Fireworks CS4 Gradient Tutorial

admin — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 14:40:09 +0000

If you work with gradients a lot you’ve probably come across the problem known as ‘banding’. Due to limitations in the amount of colours used by gradients sometimes the result isn’t so smooth. There’s a known trick to counteracting this by using some noise and Gaussian blur.

So let’s get started…

Below is a before and after pic, on the left is the result of this tutorial, on the right a typical ‘banding’ problem. Notice how the gradient is smoother on the left compared to the right.

The steps:
Create a square and set it to linear gradient with these values:

#CCCCCC and #000000

Now add some noise like in the picture shown:

Now and important step, flatten the image to make the noise permanent. Then add a mask in the the layers menu by right clicking the square and selecting ‘add mask’

Then you’ll need to reselect the square itself like in this picture to make it active:

Next add some Gaussian blur, you can experiment with values but I used 3.2 in this example.

And there you have it, simples.

Hope you enjoyed this tutorial.