PSP, Paint Shop Pro Tutorial - Creating Your Own Gradients

Creating Custom Gradients

Gradient Before Gradient After

For this tutorial you only need PSP:)

To start this tutorial click on your flood fill tool

Now let's go over to your colour palette (the right hand side of your PSP Screen) and under 'styles' go to the first box or 'Foreground' and you'll see a black arrow pointing right. Click on this window and select the image for gradient:

Click on your gradient where the arrow is pointing. Then click on your styles box again where the gradient will come up. This will bring up your gradient window box that looks like this:

If you like this particular gradient then you can download it here , then open up your My PSP in My Documents and put the gradient in your Gradients folder. You may have to restart your PSP for it to show up :)

Now click on the edit button where the finger above is pointing. Your edit window should now be open and look like this:

This may look a little daunting with all the buttons etc but don't worry, all will be revealed, lol! I'll be using this one to work with. Now click on the copy button. A copy window will come up, just give it your initials for now, like this:

Give this gradient a new name. It doesn't matter what it is but PSP won't let you copy a gradient with the same name. You now have a COPY of the original gradient but it looks exactly the same. The only thing you have to do now is to make it yours by changing the colours :)

Look above at the edit window and you'll see under the words "Gradient" that you have a preview of the different markers on the gradient. Click on each marker and then go over to the words "custom" and click on that colour to change the colour of that marker. You can slide each marker to where ever you want too. Practising on the gradients will give you some beautiful effects, some elegant or some really snazzy.

Here's what I did after editing my e4e-RoseGradient. I used the same colours but moved them so that they were even on both sides. But you can use any colour you wish :)

Once you have your gradient the way you like it click on the "Rename" button at the top of your gradient menu. Give your gradient any name you want. I use e4e in front of all of mine so that I know which ones I've made for myself. You might like to give yours your initials or something else that makes it yours :)

We now need to export our 'made' gradient so that we can keep it to use whenever we want to. Click on the Export button at the top right hand side of your gradient menu. You'll now get a different window like this. It's very important that you give it the SAME name! The window will look like the one below:

Some like to create a folder just for their own gradients. Personally I just open up My PSP in My Documents, then open up the folder called gradients and save it to that folder. If you do decide to create your own folder, make sure that folder is INSIDE the gradients folder. PSP will read all (including folders within).

You may have noticed from the image above that the window appears to be empty. That is because of the file type that PSP saves gradients ( .grd ). Let's change this now!

Now let's locate your gradient folder. There are two folders which contains gradients. One is in Program Files/Jasc Software/Gradients and the other is in My Documents as stated before.Once you have decided which folder to use, click on your new gradient, then right click and select 'rename'. Highlight the .grd file extension and change it to jgd. All versions of Paint Shop Pro will now recognise it as a gradient.

One last thing lol, we now have to get PSP to recognise your gradient so we have to clear the Cache. You don't need to get worried as immediately you start up PSP again it will recognise your gradient and update all other sections that were in the Cache folder :)

I love making my own gradients and I hope you will from now on:) I made the lilac one from exactly the same gradient :)

As always, if you have any problems at all with this tutorial or any other, then please don't hesitate to email me and I'll help you go through it step by step :)

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