This exercise was completely new to me - I've only used the gradient tool briefly before. It took a while before I actually found it in CS4, and then it took me a while longer before I realised how to select the 'radial' option! Nevertheless, I got there in the end.
For this project, I chose a picture I took a while back, which makes me grin every time I see it! I removed the sky (I could have picked an easier image... taking out the sky from around all that vegetation was very time consuming!). Here is my image,
sans sky:
It was easier said than done to choose blues that looked natural. I quickly became familiar with the gradient tool, and because it is so simple to use, it was easy to play around with different hues until I found one I liked. The course materials suggested starting with an image three times taller and twice as wide as needed, and to start the gradient from the centre - however, I found it easier to obtain a natural-looking result by using a smaller base image and starting the gradient from quite low down - this is the technique I used to produce my 'sky':
The blue is maybe a little bright, but I think it fits well with the bright red of poor old Santa's trousers! I initially made the sky much lighter at the bottom, but as the horizon is not in shot and the photo was taken looking slightly upwards, it felt more natural to me to darken it slightly.
Finally, I added a small amount of blur to the edges of the vegetation. In this low resolution version it's not really apparent, but in the full-res version, the vegetation looks more natural against the sky after the blurring.
I thought that the gradient tool may produce a good background for a design project. For the image below (which I created with the idea of party invitations in mind), I isolated a picture of some balloons that I took at a wedding, and replaced the background with a simple gradient:
I think it looks quite effective. This is a useful technique, and one that I will definitely use again in the future.
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