Doujin Sign

For today’s tip, Hal teaches a technique for those pesky gradients that you see.

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Gradient Touch-Ups

For this particular tutorial, it’s only going to be useful if you use my earlier suggestion of placing all edits on a separate layer.

You’ll find times where you need to copy or clone over a gradiented area, and no matter what you do you can’t get the gradient to align (see the bottom-right half of the pic). There’s a simple way to touch up the layer to get your gradient to match better, though.

Create a new layer just above the edits layer where your cloning/pattern stamping/copy+pasting is. If you’re using Layer -> New Layer from the menu, check the box marked “Use previous layer to create clipping mask”; if you just use the button on the layers window, hit Ctrl+G. This will set the layer as a clipping layer – anything you do in this layer will only be applied to areas that are -not- transparent in the layer immediately below it.

From there, grab a soft-edged brush in the size of your choice and go to work. You’ll want to drop the opacity of the brush to nearly nothing for the touch-up work; I generally use between 1-5% for white and 10-20% for black in most cases, although your mileage may vary. Simply airbrush the light/dark level on the clipping layer until it matches the gradient on the background layer.

NOTE: While it’s also possible to do this without a clipping layer by using the Burn and Dodge tools, it’s also much easier to foul up – since Burn and Dodge will apply their values multiple times in a single pass, it’s easy to over-lighten or darken an area.

The clipping layer will prevent your light/dark airbrushing from affecting the background later, since lightening or darkening the underlying gradient would defeat the whole purpose of a touch-up in the first place.