Senbonzakura Kageyoshi

I talked about how to make a gradient in the Gray Film Grain tutorial, but this will address a different method from what’s used there. Sometimes, using a film grain by itself isn’t good enough because it tends to decrease contrast.

Here’s a gradient that goes from black to white, and then here’s the same gradient with the Film Grain Filter (settings 8/2/2). See how both the black and white ends are more gray?

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If you want the black side to be black or if you want the white side to be white, I suggest using a Gradient Overlay, which can be found under Blending Options when you right click on the appropriate layer.

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Your Layer Style window will probably look different from mine, but the contents should be similar. For now, let’s focus on Gradient Overlay. These are the default settings:

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Now this is where I throw you a curve ball. We already made our gradient using the Gradient Tool, and we already added a film grain. So why are we adding a Gradient Overlay that obscures the Film Grain? Well we’re actually going to use an OPACITY gradient, not a color gradient.

Click on the drop down menu next to the default gradient to bring up a window with more gradient options. The default gradient is foreground -> background. The one to the right of that is Foreground to Transparent. Choose that one.

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Now double click on the actual gradient (not the arrow for the drop down menu). This lets you modify and customize the gradient.

So let’s start by trying to make the top of our square completely black, and then fading to a light gray at the bottom. As you can see, we’re starting off with the black at the wrong end of the square.

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As the picture states, the top sliders affect opacity and the bottom sliders affect color. We’ll keep color black since we’re trying to make one end of our square black. We have to reverse the opacity sliders, however, and make 0% on the left and 100% on the right. If you click on the top left slider (the black one) you’ll see a number pop up in the Opacity box below. Change it to 0%, and then do the same for the right slider (change that one to 100%).

Now the top edge of the square fades to solid black! You can drag the sliders around and adjust the opacity to tweak the gradient exactly how you want it.

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If you want the bottom to fade to white, just switch the settings around.

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So we have the original black -> white; with film grain; with black -> transparent; with transparent -> white

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After this highly-specific explanation, the more mundane uses of the Gradient Overlay should be apparent ^^