Hello and welcome to this video series on the Gimp. And on this video, we're gonna be working with the Blending Tool, otherwise known as the Gradient Tool. And a quick shortcut on your keyboard to get here would be the letter L, as in Larry. And here are the options that we have and frankly, we've got quite a few different options. More options that we've got time for in this video so I'll just kinda brush over them to give you ideas on how to get started and then the rest of it is just up to your imagination. So basically in the mode section, we've got a bazillion of them.

Normal is where you're gonna find yourself mostly. Dissolve is a good added functionality. Overlay is one that's pretty good but we can usually tackle what this is over here in the Layers dialog box. Again, just play around with these different modes. You're gonna find different opportunities for particular task that you've got to accomplish. Opacity brings it either full color or almost invisible or more transparent. You can reverse the color scheme that you got. This is the foreground and the background these two here. You can reverse that here.

The Offset, again, is another great functionality. It takes less blending, more blending. The Shape, you can go with Linear, Bi-linear, Radial, Conical, Angular, Spherical. I mean, this is pretty cool down here the Spherical. And you can add layers, add these on top of one another by creating additional layers with different gradients, different colors until you've got such a mishmash that you can do just about anything with it. So let's jump right into this and get things going here. We'll try the Linear first, 100% Opacity, zero Offset, and we'll see over this color here. I'd like to have something of similar colors in nature. Yeah, let’s go with this.

Now let's try something in the header neighborhood of 700 by 150 tall and we're gonna make sure we go with the white background versus the foreground, background or transparency colors. And here we have our first layer. Pretty much I can do this is you just simply hold your left-mouse button down and you will affect the pattern by where you let go whether it's straight across, at an angle, straight up and down, at some point in between. So there you go --- dark, light. Now we can reverse this like I was saying. Click on this box here to reverse it. And you just do so much with this. As far as the Offset, let's increase that and I'll show you how it takes some of the blending away. See, you don't have much of a blending part there. So that's why you kinda leave this as zero. Let's show you then Dissolve, it's pretty cool.

To get a good feel of the Dissolve, you have to reduce the opacity a tad bit. Just kinda drag this and as you kinda see how that gives maybe a little starry night look if you will or a paint-splattered look. Now to kinda add to this, let's throw together another layer on top if this one. And let's go with a green just to be kinda peaky looking. Now this is how it's gonna look here and let's undissolve this, let's go with normal. Let's add that.

This is on top of our background already so let's decrease the opacity or increase the transparency if you will. Let's see how that adds to our. See how it kinda tames the a little bit and we get rid of it altogether, that's the original. Yeah I don't like that. But again, it's just something you can play with here. Highlight this and trash that. Let's just go with full-blown blue for the foreground and the background let's go with white. Oops, I didn't create any layer so Control + Z, new layer, OK, on top of, straight down. Let's reverse that, actually. Yeah, that will work. Now then let's reduce the opacity. So that's the way it looks now. Get rid of the new layer. Well, you get the idea as far as being able to play around with it. Now then this being potentially a header, you can throw in a darker image here.

Say, of a some person working on a laptop and over here you put a lighter like white text. Again, just wanna give you some ideas, play around with, and as far as the shapes here. That one is a Linear. Let's try the Spiral. And here's the Spiral here. Let's get rid of the background here and increase this all the way. So this is the Spiral that we have on top of the darker background and let's bring this guy back in, decrease this. As you kinda see the functionality we got there just by adding those two different layers. So we got a lot to work with here. I mean, this is just one of the coolest tools of the Gimp in all. So I hope you enjoyed this, hope you learned something, and of course, I know you're gonna be able to apply this to a lot of your different Gimp work. Thank you much again for watching and have a great day!