› › S HORT CUT CIT Y> KELBY ONE.COM
[ 63 ]GRADIENT MAP
Shortcut #7: To unify the colors, I use gradient maps.
They work like this: Press D to set black as your Fore-
ground color, click the Create New Adjustment Layer
(half-black/half-white) icon at the bottom of the Layers
panel, and choose Gradient Map. This changes the image
from color to black and white, and a gradient thumb-
nail appears in the adjustment layer’s Properties panel (as
shown in the image here).
Click on the gradient thumbnail, and in the GradientEditor dialog that appears, double-click below the middle
of the gradient ramp to add a color stop. This brings up
the Color Picker where you can select a color (here we
chose a shade of blue, #3a628a), and then click OK. Click
OK again to close the Gradient Editor.
Back in the Layers panel, cycle through the different
blend modes (as we did in #6) until you find the desired
effect for the Gradient Map adjustment layer. Here, we set
the layer’s blend mode to Soft Light and Opacity to 30%.
As long as you don’t have a tool active that has a brush,
you can quickly change the Opacity of a layer using the
numbers on your keyboard (e.g., 3 for 30%.) Next, dupli-
cate the Gradient Map adjustment layer, set the duplicate
layer’s blend mode to Darker Color, and lower the Opacity
to 20%.