How do I create this gradient effect?

[daviscompton]

Hello everyone. This is my first time on the forums, so I am sorry if I am not doing this correctly. Anyway, I like to design airplane liveries in my free time on photoshop. Being relatively new to the software, I was wondering how gradients like the ones shown below are created. If anyone has instructions to make gradients like this, I would love to hear. Thank you!

[cmgap]

Are you referring to the pattern?

[S_Gans]

For this, I'm a big fan of using Blending modes, varying shades of gray for darkness and lightness, and Clipping Masks to control the position of the effect. Here, I created a gradient, applied it to a new layer, Made a Clipping Mask to make sure the colors only showed on the pixels I wanted, changed the blending mode to Soft Light, so that ONLY the luminosity of the grays affected my colors beneath, and then messed with the opacity. Hope it helps!

[cmgap]

Nice - Thank you for posting.

[davescm]

The second example is fairly simple it is just a pattern with a gradient mask to fade it.

The black squares are slightly more involved but can be done like this:

1. Use View – New guide layout to create a grid of guidelines

2. Set the rectangle shape tool to draw a square from the centre

3. Drag out a square just under the guide square size

4. In the layers panel – duplicate the shape then use the move tool to move it to the next grid position and scale it to say 95%

5. Repeat the above scaling to 90% , 85% , 80% etc so you have a column of reducing squares

6. Group those shape layers and duplicate the group – using the move tool to position them next to the first

7. Repeat until you have the full pattern

8. Add a new color fill layer set to red under the black shape groups

9. Convert all the shape groups plus the color fill layer to a single smart object

10 You can now make a tail-plane shape and apply the smart object with a clipping mask to that shape – rotating it as required

I hope that helps you

Dave

[cmgap]

Great Dave! Nice step-by-step.

[Chuck Uebele]

I wrote a script several years ago that will sample an image and size a pattern based on that reference image using the Deco fill scripts. It can take a little playing around to get what you want though.

Scripted Fill UI - Photoshop CS6

[c.pfaffenbichler]

For simulating a circular halftone dot a Pattern of a blurred circle set to Hard Mix may suffice, the square could be faked with two sets on blurred line Patterns (at 0˚ and 90˚).

The result could then be used as a Smart object that uses Blend If-settings to hide either the black or the white parts, colorised and combined with the other design elements.

[Semaphoric]

You could do the square dots by making a pattern with a Diamond Gradient, like so:

    

You could also convert from Grayscale to Bitmap using square halftone dots, and then convert back to Grayscale.