Gradients

This is the preset called Clean Cobalt Cone, although I doubt I'll be able to find it again. When I call up presets and try to scroll through them, they go by so quickly it's going to take me a while to get a handle on how to control it. I tried using the up and down arrow keys, but they cycle me through the presets one at a time — and there's a LOT of them. So I tried the left and right arrow keys, but they cycle me through the blend modes.

Started with the Global Glow Ball preset, as it is fresh off the menu. That's the background image, shown on the left.

The next step got a little complicated. I manuvered the right side of the gradient bracket, so that the bracket went from 1 to 32 and cmd-C (copied) the gradient. I then moved the gradient bracket to 33 through 64, cmd-V (pasted) the gradient, moved to 65 to 96, pasted again ... and so on until I had a number of bands from 1 to 256. Then I moved the left side of the gradient bracket back to one, so the range was 1 to 256 and copied that. I then moved the whole bracket to the other side (257 to 512), pasted again and cmd-F (flip) so that what was on the left was now on the right. Following along, here? Sure. At this point, I began to play with the Glue modes and decided I liked Subtract the best. Because I already had the Global Glow Ball (GGB) rendered, the results was the colors from GGB minus the colors from the new bandy gradient (NBG), resulting in the middle image, named Bandy Glow Ball (BGB).

Finally, I added the Bright Pastel preset over BGB to give the center a little more interesting flavor, using Difference glue. This resulted in Boxy Blue Rings (BBR), shown at right.
Originally I thought that BBR, when you reduce the size, might make an interesting background for a web page, but on seeing it used just for the background of a table cell, my thought is that it's a tad busy. What do you think?

Over the past several years, I've become fascinated with making frames for pictures using Photoshop. For this outing, I decided to try to use the Gradient Designer to make one of the fancy frames that looks like its got various molding-type carvings with a matte in the middle. So, I used a Rectangular Burst shape with the middle being transparent (so the picture shows through) and then some really small tweaky changes for the frame part.

I did discover something nice, though; when you copy a gradient using one size gradient bracket and then paste it into a different size gradient, KPT3 takes the beginning and end from the copied gradient and puts it at the beginning and end of the pasted gradient.

Oh, by the way, the guy in the photo — it's not me.

The last one of the gradient set results from my wanting to take some time to figure out how to do gradient on path. So, I created a Path and tried to use that to get it to work. Well, it turns out the KPT3 doesn't mean "path" because when Kai wrote KPT3 there were no such things as "paths" in Photoshop. What he meant was "selection border". Ok, fine. So I turned the path into a selection with a feather of three pixels and tried to apply the gradient. Photoshop argued, "Can't apply filter because the selection is empty." Ok, fine. So I filled the selection with black, applied the gradient to the border, selected all the black and deleted it. It was nice, but boring.

So I made the selection again (same selection, different layer), transformed the selection by rotating it 90°, filled it with black, applied the gradient, selected the black and deleted it. Now the picture has some symmetry and balance and, because of the feathering, a sense of motion. I played for awhile with different backgrounds and decided black worked. Think "Paul Klee".