Part Two - Quick Mask
Fading to one side

Your Quick Mask buttons are located down near the bottom of your tool palette. See them down there, circled in red? Those little buttons have some very handy uses. I'll show you a few examples here, then you can either play with it all to see what happens, or google for more information.

Let's say we are making a banner or other graphic that we want to fade to one side for text, or some such. Something like this one, perhaps:

We want to make it lighter to the right so we can put some pretty text over there. Here's what to do.

 

First, make sure your graphic is all one layer, or that you are working on the particular layer you want to fade. In our case, we are going to fade the whole thing, so it's one layer. Make sure your background and foreground colors are set to default by clicking the tiny little black and white boxes under the colors. Make sure black is the foreground and white is the background. Click on the Quick Mask button on the right. When you hover your mouse over the button, it will say "Edit in Quick Mask Mode." After you click it, select your gradient tool, making sure it is set to "linear gradient" in the options bar. We want our graphic to fade to the right, so we want to begin our gradient on the left. Click on the very left of your graphic, hold down your shift key (to make a straight line) and drag your mouse over to the right, then release.

Don't panic when you release! It will not show up as a black and white gradient, but rather as a red to transparent gradient. That's because you are in Quick Mask mode, and that's just how it works.

I didn't pick very good colors for the red to show up, but it's there, trust me. Next thing to do is to leave Quick Mask mode. You do that by clicking on the Quick Mask button to the left. When you hover over it, it will say "edit in normal mode." As soon as you click it, "marching ants" will show up over part of your image.

NOTE: How you place your gradient will determine how much of the graphic is covered with the marching ants, which in turn determine how much of the graphic will be faded. You can place your gradient by starting and ending outside the image area to change what will be affected. You can also use the arrow keys to move the selection to the right or left to begin your fade earlier or later in the pic. This part is hard to explain, so just play with it a bit to see what I'm babbling on about.

Now just press your "delete" button on your keyboard. The selected area will be faded from normal on the left to more faded to the right, like below:

Next I put a white fill layer under the image so that you can see the fading easier, and then I added some uninspired text on the right, just to show you an example.

I'm sure you can come up with many creative and impressive ways to use this trick! Just apply a little imagination! Next we will see how to use the Quick Mask mode to add some nice borders on an image.

Quick Mask Links: Fade to one side | Adding borders | Add color to a black/white photo

Part One: Intro | Part Two: Quick Mask | Part Three: Layer Mask | Part Four: Mask Brushes

Tutorials Index