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How to Create Eye-catching Images using Photoshop Gradient Maps

Gradient Maps

Color gradient using Photoshop Gradient Maps. Photoshop Gradient Maps are just one of multiple ways to color grade an image. Color grading is a term more commonly used in the movie or video industry. Have you ever watched that scary move and the screen has an eerie monocromatic green look to it. That is an example of color grading. In this case we are going to use complimentary colors in out Photoshop Gradient Maps. If you do not understand color theory check out this video and use the power of color grading to improve you photography. Color grading can be used in multiple ways in photography. In this case we are going to intensify the colors seen in out image. In some cases you will desaturate the color palette. Neither is right or wrong but more subjective. When I start to release downloadable Adobe Photoshop Actions, you will see a lot of them are based around Photoshop Gradient Maps. The second part of the this process is the incorporation of masks and blending modes.

Photoshop for Photographers

“Photoshop for Photographers” was designed as a supplemental resource for my class, “Photoshop for Photographers.” The goal is to teach you how to use Adobe Photoshop step by step. I understand this path is not for everyone and there is no reason you have to follow this process. However, if you want to really learn the program, I would suggest learning everything on the video and then move on.

Photoshop Gradient Maps

Photoshop Gradient Maps

  • great for color grading
  • improving skin color
  • matching composites color

Photoshop Gradients Maps can be used to enhance color in a variety of applications.

JOHN WHITEHEAD IMAGES

Items Covered in this Video

Photoshop Gradient Maps.

Photoshop Gradient Maps-In this example you can see the before and after of using complimentary colors to add pop to your image.

Photoshop Requirements and Hard Drives

Working in Adobe Photoshop and with photography is more than just installing software and saving images to your computer. Computers these days are using solid State Drives SSD, which are fast, but do not have a large storage capacity. If you start downloading a bunch of photographs to your computer, it will not take long until you get a “Scratch Disk Full” error. This means your internal hard drive is full. Just to run a computer and Adobe Photoshop you need a sufficient amount of free space. Image previews are usually stored in a computer’s cache. This a temporary storage so it can quickly retrieve previews without recreating them every time you look at them. I cover this in the my Photoshop Preferences Tutorial. Personally, I store all caches on an external hard drive. At this moment I have 4 different hard drives hooked up to my computer. Two SSD’s and two enterprise optical drives, each performing a different task. All these drives are backed up via BackBlaze.

Another important aspect of running any of Adobe’s products are them requirements. Adobe lists the minimum requirements to run each of their programs, but you never want to be using the minimums, or the speed will drive you nuts. You need to realize that that your computer and every other application you run have requirements. So if you have Photoshop’s min of RAM 4GB, that will not allow any for your computer to run or a browser like Chrome. Below I will have two lists. One is some reasonable minimum requirements to run Adobe Software and what I am running. The second is a list of issues you will run into with insufficient hard drive space, and low minimum requirements. Just about every online student that I teach run into these issues. I hope this helps.

Minimum Requirements

  • RAM 8-16 GB (I use 64GB)
  • Internal SSD Hard Drive Space, 512 GB I have 1TB
  • External Hard Drive 1TB, but more is better
  • Processor Intel or equivalent i5 quad core processor or apple M1 or M2 (I use Intel i7 8core)
  • A non integrated Graphics Card (AMD Radeon Pro 5700 8 GB)

Insufficient Requirements

  • Scratch Disk Full
  • Slow Computer
  • Artificial Intelligence takes forever
  • You can only open one program at at time
  • Photoshop constantly crashes
  • Learning Photoshop is frustrating because of the above issues

I have a Facebook Group called, “Learn Adobe Lightroom, Photoshop, and Bridge.” I created this group because I get a lot of questions on YouTube that are hard to answer unless I can see the issue. This will allow a place you can ask questions, and more importantly post images and videos.

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