Hello again, I'm back with another little tutorial just showing off some things I've learned and forgot to share. In this little tutorial I'm going to be talking about a few things. One of them is gradients and the other is filling in a ground texture quickly and painlessly.

Little note, I'm still only using Photoshop 5.5, I have 7 but really, there is no point. I've learned the hell out of 5.5 and I know all the shortcuts. So this tutorial may vary depending. Also, remember to use layers, every step I do is pretty much a new layer in my image. Layers are you're friends.

So first off, gradients. Now I know I told you never to use them unless you knew what you were doing. Well, now I'm going to show you how to use them intelligently. At least in my opinion.

Ok we need a background, lemme draw something quick:

There we have some houses or something. Now let's say I want to have a gradient background in there for some reason, it's night time it'll be blues and then we'll add some stars in there... First, however, the gradient.

Here is the background with a gradient in it... An ugly ugly gradient. Now this image right here is 256 colours, not good for a low res game. So let's knock that image down a bit. Here's the tricky part:

When optimizing an image in photoshop, I never trust the program to choose the right colours. It would more than likely [if there were more colours in this image] give all the colours to the blues and start taking away other colours. So what we do is take the gradient parts and select them.

Then we open a new image and paste the gradient into it. Now, we go to Image, Mode, Indexed Colour and say yes to flattening layers. Now, in the dialog box that appears, change the palette to Perceptual and the number of colours to 10 and the dither to Pattern

This is what I have:

Then I select the gradient again [just select the white and then invert the selection CNTRL-SHIFT-I] copy and paste it back into the scene for this:

detail

I'm just gonna do the windows now and then I'll get started on the stars.

As you can see, I added a little window pane to the window on the left.

Ok 24 colours, doing alright. Now the stars, here's a quick and easy way to do stars. Create a new layer and fill it black. Then go to Filter, Noise, Add Noise, set it to about these settings:

Make sure it's monochromatic. Then create a new curves adjustment layer and fiddle with the nodes until some stars are bright and most stars have faded.

Here are my settings:

And here are my stars.

Now, merge the curves layer and the stars layer and then place the stars layer over the sky layer. You do have these on seperate layers don't you? This is why layers are such awesome things. Change the star layer's blending to Screen:

And I get this:

click for larger

Not the best image in the world, but I think it works for the purpose of the tutorial.

The next part will be applying this technique in a slightly different way, plus I'll introduce you to another function of Photoshop.

back - next