Colour transition in photoshop

Text effect

[trillianjedi]

I have a few words of text in a Photoshop doc, say:-

Hello World, this is a test

... and I want the colour to transition starting in green on the "Hello" and fading through yellow to red at the end ("test").

If that makes sense. Think of an audio LED meter.

Is that an easy thing to do? I could of course do it manually, but it would take me forever. I suspect the red to green is easy enough - the yellow in the middle maybe tricky?

Thanks!

[rocknbil]

1. Create a layer below the text layer.
2. Be sure the text layer is selected, then from the main menu, Select->Load Selection. Make sure "[text layer name] transparency" is selected.
3. On the layers palette, make the text layer invisible and make sure you're on the layer you created in 1.
4. Go to the gradient tool. In the options palette of the gradient tool, select any gradient and make sure transparency is off.
5. On the options palette, click edit.
6. Click duplicate, name this gradient, and experiment with the color values.
7. Now you're good to go, mouse-click and hold down on the left of the selected area, hold down the shift key so it makes a perfectly horizontal blend, then drag across the seleced area. Release. Voila.

Ctrl-Z to undo and edit the gradient until it's just what you want.

[trillianjedi]

Brilliant - thanks! I'll have a crack at that later and let you know how I got on...

[katana_one]

That works, but an easier way (in my opinion) is to select the text layer in the layers palette, then go to

Layer > Layer Style > Gradient Overlay

Click on the gradient to edit it. You will see several defaults you can pick from, or you can just click on the gradient sliders to move them around and click on their color swatches to change color. When the gradient is how you like it, click ok (you can even create a new gradient here and save it).

You will also see the options to change the direction/angle of the gradient.

This way is better because the text and the gradient both remain editable, so if you need to go back and change something next week, you can do it without having to re-create the gradient or the text.