How to make a gradient in Paint by Zaweba
Paint by Zaweba's Gradient tool (G) has 12 kinds, from linear to freeform points, and stays live with handles until you press Enter.
Making a gradient takes one tool in Paint by Zaweba: press G for the Gradient tool, pick one of its types, and drag across the canvas. The colours come from the gradient editor and the Gradients panel, where you add as many colour and opacity stops as you like. Until you press Enter, the gradient stays live with handles on the canvas, so you can drag it about and change settings; Esc cancels it.
That live stage is what makes gradients pleasant to work with. You aren't committing the moment you let go of the mouse. You can try a radial instead of a linear, swap the end colours or move the centre, and see the result straight away.
Picking a type
The Gradient tool covers linear, radial, angle, reflected, diamond, elliptical, square, arc along or across the band, spiral, along a path and freeform points. Linear is the everyday one for skies and fades. Radial suits a glow or a spotlight. Reflected mirrors a linear gradient from a central line, which is good for a metal bar or a tube. Angle sweeps round like a clock hand, and spiral twists the colours round a centre for something more decorative.
Freeform points is different from the rest. Instead of a start and an end, you drop colour points anywhere on the canvas and the colours blend between them. It suits soft backgrounds and painterly colour washes that a straight band can't make.
The settings that matter
Spread runs from 5 to 1000 percent and changes how far the colours stretch, while offset slides the bands along. Pad, Repeat and Mirror decide what happens beyond the ends: Pad holds the last colour, Repeat starts again, and Mirror bounces back for an unbroken stripe. Linear or Smooth blend changes how evenly colours pass between stops.
The colour space choice is worth knowing about. RGB is the traditional blend, but a blue to yellow gradient in RGB passes through a dull grey in the middle. The perceptual option, OKLab, keeps the middle bright and the steps looking even to the eye. Turn on dither for wide, gentle gradients such as a sky, as it breaks up visible stepping. Opacity and blend mode let a gradient tint what's underneath rather than cover it.
Editing the colours
Open the gradient editor or the Gradients panel to add stops. Each colour stop sets a colour and each opacity stop sets how see-through the gradient is at that point, so you can fade a colour into nothing. There's also a Noise type, with roughness, RGB or HSB limits, restrict colours, add transparency and a randomise button, which throws out irregular stripes of colour that look good as textures or retro backgrounds.
Gradients you make are shared across the app, so the same one can fill shapes, text, the paint bucket and Layer Art. If you have gradient files in .grd format from elsewhere, import them into a library.
A gradient you can change later
If you may want to change the gradient next week, don't paint it onto a pixel layer at all. Use Layer > New Fill Layer and choose a gradient fill. It covers the artboard, has the same style, angle, scale, reverse, repeat, blend and colour space settings, and a double-click on its thumbnail opens it again for editing.
Paint by Zaweba is free software and works offline, so there's no limit on how many gradients you save or how many times you try them.
