Creating Custom Gradients

JD
Posted By
James D
Apr 10, 2008
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593
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1
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Closed
I am familiar with how to create custom gradients in Photoshop but I am not sure if it possible (or how) to create a gradient shape. For example, the standards are radial, linear, etc. I want create a specific shaped gradient.

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P
prowler
Apr 11, 2008
James D wrote:
I am familiar with how to create custom gradients in Photoshop but I am not sure if it possible (or how) to create a gradient shape. For example, the standards are radial, linear, etc. I want create a specific shaped gradient.

I could be wrong (have been before, no doubt will be again, and if so would be more than happy to be corrected if someone out there wishes to do so), but I’m afraid that you are out of luck. To my knowledge, there is no way to do this in Photoshop, athough by dint of talent and effort you might be able to achieve the effect for a given image. The key is in the term "shape."

You see, in Photoshop, a shape is a vector object. As it happens, PS is a raster image editor, and although it supports shapes in a number of ways (paths, shape layers, etc.), to my knowledge there is no way to define one’s own gradient shapes, in the fashion that one might define, for example, a custom fill pattern or brush. Although, in the best of all worlds, since we have radial, linear, pyramid (diamond), etc., I see no reason why Adobe should not provide the capacity to define a custom shape for the application of a gradient.

Well, maybe, perhaps, since we’re talking about creating custom designed alpha channels, it might be that the mathematics involved would bring today’s systems to their knees, and make every redraw take so long that making, and consuming, a nice high tea while the process completed would be quite feasible, at least using current SOTA processors.

Hell, I don’t know. I’m a programmer, an MCP, but primarily of VB6 and .NET database apps, and have no idea what it might take to add this capability to Photoshop. It does seem to me, however, that arbitrarily defined gradient shapes would require some pretty serious programming, and unless the ROI (for Adobe, not us) could be demonstrated reasonably convincingly I wouldn’t look for it anytime soon.

Like I said, I could be way off base, and would welcome any contributions from those of you who are hip to the innards of Photoshop setting me straight. Cheers, y’all. 😉

prowler

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