The great thing about texture gradients is that they are infinitely customizable. You can have any, all, or none of your gradient. You can even change the color, width, or spacing of a gradient.
The problem with this is that there is no way to do this without messing up the image itself. I mean, you can’t just put a gradient in the middle of your image and have the image look “flat” and perfect.
I mean I could imagine Photoshop or Gimp doing this, but it seems like a very bad idea. Photoshop has a gradient tool, but it’s limited to only two colors. I do not believe this is the kind of tool we want to have in the hands of the average consumer.
I actually would put this in the top ten most annoying things about Photoshop because it makes me sad that the world has to know things that no one is going to do any better. Like Photoshop’s gradient isn’t just limited to two colors. It can take any number of colors that you specify. And the result is still a gradient, still a flat image.
I’m not sure how you can be sad about that. I think its great that anyone can create something impressive with a tool they already have access to. And when you can’t even do that, that makes you sad. I would say its not that Photoshop is bad, its that the average consumer isn’t going to do any better.
The problem with a lot of these apps is that they make their apps so easy to use that they can do it in a completely random and arbitrary way that will result in a huge variance in the quality of the result. The problem is that the average consumer doesn’t have the ability to know how to do this, or the ability to understand the differences between random and meaningful, and so on. When you can’t even get close to the top of what’s possible, that makes you sad.
There is a large community of people who know how to do this, and they make beautiful textures. Here’s a quick tutorial on how to do a texture gradient.
What you want to do is blend two or more colors together, and paint over them, creating your own texture. This is a tricky process because you will end up with a huge variation in the quality, and this is where the “texture” term comes from. The “texture” can be considered a composite of the many tiny bits of color that make up a color image, and so making a smooth, “flat” gradient is a challenge.
You could use a light hand and blend by hand, but it’s a hassle. You will need a tool like a paint brush or a paintbrush of your own to create your gradient. This may or may not be difficult to do depending on your skill level.
The challenge here is to create a consistent, smooth gradient, so the colors within the gradient will all behave the same (e.g. if there is some variation in the color, it will still be consistent when the gradient is applied). Another way to look at it is that you have to get each color exactly the same, or you will end up with a mess.
