From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

688 Creating gradient molecules in Photoshop

From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

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688 Creating gradient molecules in Photoshop

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- Hey gang, this is Deke McClelland. Welcome to Deke's Techniques. Now, I'm calling this episode Creating Gradient Molecules in Photoshop, but we're really going to be generating a kind of random fuzzy Voronoi diagram, in which neighboring regions meet up with each other to form more-or-less straight lines, but they end up looking like cute little molecules. Now, this is a very basic, very old technique. I first documented it in my MacWorld Photoshop 2.5 Bible back in 1993, but I learned of it from Kai Krause, who many of you may remember as the one-time Gandalf of Photoshop who went on to create Kai's Power Tools, Live Picture, and so forth, and it could not be easier. All you have to do is select the Gradient Tool, set it to the Lighten mode, for reasons I'll explain in a moment, and draw a bunch of radial gradients, and you can literally not go wrong with this technique, which makes it terribly amusing when you have nothing better to do. Let's say your date stands you up. Well then, grab the Gradient Tool and draw this. Now, the pattern ends up looking very bright, which is why we're going to darken things up and add some color using some solid fill layers. Here, let me show you exactly how it works. All right, so here's one possible molecule pattern, but literally, every time you perform these steps you're going to get something different. Now, the first step is to go into the File menu and choose the New command, or you can press Control + N, or Command + N on the Mac. Now, notice that I've set my unit of measure to pixels, and I've dialed in a Width value of 2900 pixels, and a Height of 1968, and that just happens to work well on this screen. I've also set the resolution to 300 pixels per inch. But none of that matters. You can dial in absolutely any values you like, but you do want to make sure that your Color Mode is set to RGB, and you want your Background Contents to be Black, as the place to start, and then I'll go ahead and click the Create button, or the OK button, or what have you. All right, now you want to select the Gradient Tool, which you can get by pressing the G key, and just to make sure you and I are on the same page, go ahead and right-click on this little gradient icon on the far left side of the options bar and choose Reset Tool, and that will go ahead and instate the default settings. You also want to make sure you're looking at your default foreground and background colors, and so if you're not, just tap the D key, D being for default, and then tap the X key in order to swap them, so the foreground color is white and the background color is black. Then return to the options bar and select this second icon right here in order to create a radial gradient. Now, we want these gradients to lighten each other, which means you need to change the blend mode. Now normally, if you wanted one gradient to brighten another, you would go with Screen, but notice what happens if I do. If I go ahead and draw a gradient like so, and then I draw another one next to it, then the gradients basically blur together as we're seeing here, and that is a function of the screen mode. That is not what we want, however, so we'll go ahead and back step by pressing Control + Alt + Z, or Command + Option + Z on the Mac, a couple of times. We want to create a seam between our gradients, and to make that happen, we want a less-forgiving brightening mode, specifically Lighten, and so now notice if I draw a single gradient, I get the same effect I did a moment ago, but as soon as I add a second one, I get a seam between the two like so, and now you just want to go ahead and draw a bunch of gradients. Now, notice if you draw big gradients, then you are going to get big seams. If you draw tiny gradients, like so, you're going to get small seams. So it all depends on what you're looking for, and by the way, if draw a small gradient, and then you go and draw a different one, and you're unhappy with that one right there, even though we're applying entirely static effects, you can just go ahead and redraw that guy at a larger size, and you'll replace the previous information. All right, now I'll go ahead and draw a gradient right about there, and another one at this location. So notice that I'm not drawing tiny gradients, like so. Now you can if you want to, but you also have the option of drawing larger ones that exceed well into the space of the other gradients if you like, and so just feel free to experiment, of course, and try out different effects. I'm going to draw a pretty big gradient over here, and then I'm going to fill in this region as well. All right, now it looks to me like we have a few empty spots such as down here toward the bottom of the image, and that's looking a little small to me, so I'll just draw a bigger one, like so, and then I'll draw a fairly big one at this location, another one to fill in that seam, and so forth. Now you don't necessarily want to fill in all the dark spots, because if you do, you're going to get less of a molecule effect, and you're going to end up with more of something that looks like a cushion pattern. All right, so I'm going to undo that last one that I just added. And you may notice, at this point, that we have very little darkness left inside the image. To reinstate that darkness and and some color, I'm going to add a couple of solid fill layers, and so I'll go up to the Layer menu, choose New Fill Layer, and then choose Solid Color, and I'll go ahead and call this guy shadows, and then I'll click OK, and that'll bring up the Color Picker dialog box. Now, I want to add a kind of purple shade, so I'm going to set the hue value to 270 degrees. I'm going to take the saturation value up to 100%, and I'll take the brightness value down to 50%, and I'll click OK. All right, now I'll just go ahead and set this guy to the multiply mode by selecting Multiply from the top-left menu here inside the Layers panel, and now I want to reveal the highlights inside the image, so I'll double-click on an empty portion of this shadows layer in order to bring up the Layer Style dialog box, and then I'll drop down to this bottom slider bar labeled Underlying Layer, and I'll press the Alt key, or the Option key on the Mac, and drag the left half of this white slider triangle all the way over to the left-hand side of the bar so that the first value reads zero, because we didn't change it, and the second value reads zero, split, 255, so that we have a soft transition across the entire luminance spectrum, at which point I'll go ahead and click OK. Now to me, that doesn't look quite dark enough, and so I'm going to create a copy of this layer by pressing Control + J, or Command + J on the Mac, to darken things up even further, and then I'll reduce the opacity value to 50%, and the easiest way to do that is to not press the 5 key. That will have no effect, and that's because we're changing the opacity value specifically for the Gradient Tool to 50%, which is not what I want, so I'll go ahead and tap the 0 key to take it back up to 100%, and then I'll switch back to the Rectangular Marquee Tool, which you can get by pressing the M key, and I will tap the 5 key to take the opacity of this layer down to 50%. All right, now at this point, I decided I wanted to add a little bit of blue to the midtones, and so I'll go ahead and jump this layer once again, but this time I'll press Control + Alt + J, or Command + Option + J on the Mac, which will allow me to name the layer as I create it, and I'll call this guy midtones and click OK, and now I'll double-click on the colorful swatch right there in order to revisit the Color Picker dialog box. I'll change the hue value to 210 degrees, which is blue, and then I'll take the brightness value up to 77%, and I'll click OK. Now, I'll change the blend mode from Multiply to Color, way down here at the bottom of the menu, and then I'll double-click on an empty portion of this layer to bring back up the Layer Style dialog box. Now, at this point, I want to modify the settings associated with this Underlying Layer slider, but if I try to drag the left half of the white triangle, I'm going to move the black triangle instead, which is just fine, gets it out of the way, and now I'll drag the left half of this white triangle until that value that's changing right there reads 128, like so, and then I'll return the black slider triangle to zero, which is at the far left side of the slider bar, and then I'll press the Alt key, or the Option key on the Mac, and drag the right half of this triangle to 128 as well. So the first value should read zero, slash, 128, followed by 128, slash, 255, at which point you're going to affect the midtones instead of the shadows, and I'll click OK, and just so you can see the difference, this is before, and this is after. So, little bit subtle, but you can see how we have more blues now inside the midtones of the image. All right, now the great thing about all of these color layers here is that they're going to respond dynamically to any future changes you make. So for example, let's say I think these areas are too dark, then I would return to the background at the bottom of the Layers panel, and then I would switch back to my Gradient Tool, and I would just go ahead and drag to create a couple of more gradients, as you see me doing right here, and I might put one in the top-left corner of the image as well, add one at this location, possibly one here, and then one here as well, and of course you can continue to make as many modifications as you like, and that's how you create a bunch of soft spheres that look something like molecules bumping up against each other here inside Photoshop. Now, if you're a member of Lynda.com/linkedinlearning, I have a couple of follow-up episodes in which I show you how to take our fuzzy molecules so far and sharpen them with the help of a smart filter, which then allows us to go back and edit the molecules to any extent we like. If you're looking forward to next week, I'll show you how to create a regular hex pattern of molecules that you can then blend in order to create these elaborate effects right here, and don't forget to come by deke.com, where you'll find documentation and imagery from what are now 690 episodes of Deke's Techniques. That's right, I've passed the Simpsons, but in their defense, my thing requires a lot less animation. Deke's Techniques each and every week. Keep watching.

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