Well every time I try to take the time to make a full tutorial I kept falling short and ending up with a half finished tutorials so I thought I’d try aiming for something smaller. Hence a weekly quick look at a tool or feature.

This week I’ll be looking at the Gradient Maps adjustment in Photoshop, these are useful for changing colours. I’m going to be using Adobe Photoshop CS4.

One thing to bear in mind is since CS3 you have been able to apply Adjustments as new layers without permanently changing the image and keeping it editable. With CS4 they cemented this idea more by combining Adjustments into its own palette where you can edit them.

Now I feel that if you are still using CS2, CS4 is the perfect reason to upgrade, so I will not be covering the relevant locations of these tools in CS2. But just so you know you can find them under Image > Adjustments, the outcome however will be permanent.

Now let’s say you’ve made something, flattened it or not saved a PSD version, and later come back to it and want to change the colours. There are other ways of achieving this as with most things in Photoshop, but I’m going to be using Gradient Maps to achieve this. So let’s find them.

Above is the Adjustment Palette as it appears in CS4. The tool we want is Gradient icon on the third row, second from the right. Clicking this will bring up the second window.

To get to the same option in CS3 you have to go through Layer > New Adjustment Layer > Gradient Map… or at the bottom of the layers palette click the half black, half white circle icon and selection Gradient Map to bring up the Gradient controls.

Your work will now look something like this.

Not quite what you want. Let’s look at the Gradient Map a bit closer, click on the gradient. You will have noticed that the text was the darker area and the background was the lighter area.

The left hand colour replaces the darker sections while the right hand colour replaces the lighter sections. Using this logic if I want my text to be light blue and my background to be a strange pink my gradient would look like this:

 

You get the idea. Using these settings my text and background look like this:

Sexy. Obviously this can be applied to more than simple things like this but it makes an easy alternative to cutting out the text or using layer masks.

That’s all folks.