How To Create Those Brushed Gradients Adobe Photoshop tutorial

[Carsten 0]

Title: How to create those brushed gradients.

Author: Carsten de Vries

Level: Easy

Basic concept: Nice brushed gradients (for avatar creation)

Tools needed: Adobe Photoshop and some talent for colorpicking

 

Example brushed gradient avatar:

http://www.mv.nl/

 

Step one:

Start Photoshop and create a new image around 80x80 pixels with a transparent background.

Use 96x96 pixels if you want to use it for MSN Messenger, that's what I did and what you

see in the example.

 

Step two:

 

http://www.mv.nl/

 

Now, pick a foreground color (darker) and a background color (lighter). In this tutorial

I used #950A0A as foreground color and #C94343 as background color. Now use the gradient

tool [Gradient Tool] to make a gradient from the top to the bottom of your background

layer. Make sure the line is completely straight for the best gradient.

 

Step three:

 

http://www.mv.nl/

 

Add some noise to your background layer (Filters -> Noise -> Add Noise). I add 11% on my

layer but you could use something around 10%-15%. You don't have to change any other

settings.

 

Step four:

 

http://www.mv.nl/

 

Add a motion blur with a 0 degrees angle (default) and a distance between 10-20 pixels.

In the example I use a distance of 15 pixels. You get something like the thing above..

Basicly your finished now, but it's more fun to add more effects. Proceed to step five

if you want to.

 

Step five:

 

http://www.mv.nl/

 

You don't have to do this step but it's cool. Duplicate your layer and set the blend

mode to multiply. Duplicate your layer one more time and set the blend mode to overlay.

You can experiment and add more duplicate layers with different blending modes if you

want to.

 

Last step:

To wrap it up, add some nice text. Add a 1 pixel border if you want to get a similar

result. Create a new layer and select all (ctrl+a), Edit -> Stroke, set width to 1px,

make sure you have location on inside, change the color to your foreground color and

your finished!

 

This is my brushed gradient avatar result:

http://www.mv.nl/

 

I hope you learned something from this tutorial, and that this will not be my last tutorial here.

[whyme 0]

neat effect, you can also get the "Mac OS X" brushed metal effect by using a grey gradient instead of a red one.

[PrettyMe 0]

Again I'm wishing I had PS. But I think I could do the same on PSP 8, I'll have to try and see.

[whyme 0]

hehe, i think it would sorts work on PSP.

[Dragonfly 0]

That's quite simple yet looking quite professional. I like it. I'm doing it using differenet colors ...hehe.. thanks for the tip.

[Carsten 0]

It looks really cool when you do it with dark-green - light-green. When I originally wrote this tutorial I had my example in those colors, but I wanted to do it in red now. Well, I'm glad that you guys like my tutorial.