Video Transcript

Today we're going to look at making a basic rainbow in Photoshop. It's really straightforward. The first thing you have to do is go to file and create a new document and for this purpose we're just going to make it 500 pixels X 500 pixels by 72 resolution because this is just going to be for the web. If it was for print say you probably would want that resolution to be 300 but for now we are going to stick with that and just hit o'kay. That gives us a blank canvas to start and what we can do is just click once on the marquise tool because what you want to do is fill, you know draw a rectangle first and we're going to want to fill that with a rainbow pattern that is found under Paint Bucket since I have already uncovered it it is showing but usually you'll find your gradient tool under that Paint Bucket so you click on that and hold and like most tools in Photoshop up top you've got your tool options. So we want to pick out the rainbow color and there it is at the bottom, just click once on that and the next step is to holding down the shift key on the keyboard click right next to the edge of your marquise that you've made and click once and hold and using that shift key it is making it a straight line or a 45 degree angle as you can see and that works for a lot of tools in Photoshop by the way. Anyway we've got our shift key held down, we've got our mouse button held down and we're going to the bottom of that rectangular selection and just let go of the mouse and you'll see that we've got our beginnings of our rainbow. To get that on its own layer off the background layer we're just going to choose cut from the edit menu which effectively erases it and copies it at the same time and then choose edit and paste. With the move tool I can move that anywhere I want on the canvas. So our next step is to arch it and we'll do that simply by, with the layer selected, going to filter to distort and to polar our coordinates and we can see a previous already and we can zoom out of that preview. If for some reason it's looking not like a rainbow it is because it needs to be set to rectangular to polar. So that looks almost there. So we just hit o'kay and at this point you want to get rid of that piece there and an easy way to just sort of fix this is to do a free transform under edit, free transform or actually we could just go right to the point which would be rotating it to 180 degrees. There it is and to get rid of the lower half we are going to use our marquise again and just kind of eyeball where that center is, select it, making sure we're on layer, the rainbow layer and with it selected just hit backspace to delete what's inside of the marquise, click once outside the marquise to deselect and we've got the beginnings of a rainbow. One last option to kind of soften that hard edge is go to filter, blur and you can try blur or blur more. I think I'll try blur more because that's a little more effective and now that harsh edge is all set. So now you can use this on any document. Just open it up and drag and drop it over and that's how you make a simple rainbow in Photoshop.