From the course: Photoshop for Video Editors: Core Skills

Understanding the Gradient Wipe effect

From the course: Photoshop for Video Editors: Core Skills

Start my 1-month free trial

Understanding the Gradient Wipe effect

“

- One of my favorite effects is the Gradient Wipe. It's incredibly versatile because you could literally create transitions in Photoshop. Those transitions could be used between clips or to actually animate things like parts of a logo or text on. Let me show you what's involved here. Here we are in premiere and I've got a simple sequence already built out. What you're seeing is on the base level of video clip. Now above this video clip, we've placed some text. This text is going to animate. Now, if you look at it, you'll see that the Gradient Wipe effect is applied. Let's turn it off for a moment. Here there's just the text overlaid on top. In the sequence, I've placed a gradient on top. In this case, it's a cloudy night sky. The areas that are dark will be used for one part of the transition and the areas that are bright for another. What will happen is it will look a little bit like it's operating through the fog or the mist here. Now for this to work, you don't need that top layer visible. In fact, you can either disable the whole track or if it's on a track, but you don't want it to be seen, you can right click and unenable the clip. What you do need though is to select the layer itself and apply the gradient. Your Gradient Wipe will be found within the effects panel or your transitions menu. In fact, there may be more than one. One can be used between clips and others can be applied to a clip. I'm going to use the one that goes directly to the clip, because I want to reveal this title which is overlayed on a higher track. So in the search panel here, we'll just type gradient and you'll see, there's actually two. One in the transition category, which is actually an effect. And then one down here in the video transitions category let's drop that one onto the clip here. Now, once you've done that you'll need to tell it which layer to use. So I'm going to specify in this case to look at track three. What this is going to do is create the transition. You need to adjust the transition complete amount. So you see here as we adjust this, it starts to disappear. Now, initially it's a little bit rough because there's no softness. So the key here is crank up the softness, so you get a nice, gentle transition. You don't have to use 100%, you can lose a lower value their like 50, for example. And what we'll do is key frame, the transition complete. So I'll have it start 100% complete. Go forward a few seconds and set that to zero, effectively creating the reveal. Remember you can also right click and apply things like ease out and ease in to make that look a little better. All right, let's play this back. Now, it may not play perfectly smooth initially because it is a bit of an intense effect but you see that the text is revealing over time and it's slowly revealing that text and bringing it out. Now, what I can do is choose that and move these a little closer. This will speed up the transition. So now, let's watch. And you see that it is a faster transition as the text is revealed. Now, you can play with the softness, the completion amount and other settings here as well as change the direction. If you invert the gradient it's going to reveal this in the opposite direction. Let's just quickly select this and render it, so it plays a little more smoothly. We'll say render selection. You'll notice that unfortunately the Gradient Wipe is not in accelerated effect but that doesn't detract from its usefulness. Now let's watch that in real time. And you see the organic nature of the Gradient Wipe. That's a pretty basic use but let's take a look at something a little more elaborate where we use a Gradient Wipe on multiple pieces plus animate in 3D space, after effects can really tap into the Gradient Wipes power. Now let's take a look at this. You'll notice that the Gradient Wipe is used to gently reveal parts of the photo and other elements. Now let's turn on the 3D camera. The 3D camera is moving through the photo to reveal the different parts. And as you see here, it's pretty cool. So as the different elements here on this piece of letterhead and other drawings, the photo, and all the pieces are revealed it takes this old piece of history and adds new life and lets us reveal the elements more gradually to create something much more interesting for a documentary. The Gradient Wipes just has a certain class to it and it's infinitely flexible, but it all goes back to Photoshop where you create the gradients. So let's explore that process.

Contents