Editing gradients
Various places in the program allow you to fill something with a gradient. When you choose to use a gradient to fill a panel in the Panel Properties dialog or a balloon in the Balloon Properties dialog, the dialog expands to show the gradient editing controls inline. When you choose to fill a path with a gradient in the part editor, you are given a gradient popup button. Clicking it shows a popup window in which you can edit the gradient. The gradient controls in both of these situations are identical.
This shows the gradient editor displaying a two-color, linear gradient that gradates the colors from top to bottom. All of these details can be changed in the gradient editor. The colors and how they are distributed through the gradient are controlled by the gradient bar on the left. The type of gradient, linear or radial, is control by the selector control at the top. The large square area serves as a preview for the gradient and allows you to control specific aspects of the linear or radial gradient.
Color Stops
On the left side of the gradient editor is a vertical bar on which you can edit the color stops of the gradient. The color stops are the colored tabs attached to the bar. Color stops have a location and a color.
Moving color stop
You can edit a color stop’s location by dragging the color stop up and down along the bar. You can see the effect this has on the gradient in the controls. The gradient doesn’t have to have a color stop at the beginning or the end of the range. If the first stop isn’t at the beginning, the gradient begins with that stop’s color as a solid color until it gets to the stop. The same is true if the last stop isn’t at the end. Otherwise, for each pair of adjacent color stops, the color smoothly transitions from the color of one stop to the color of the next one along the gap between the stops.
If two color stops are in the same location, the gradient will contain a sharp color boundary at that location. The color stop markers on the bar will each become two half-color stop markers in this case so you are able to click on either of them.
Changing the color of color stops
You can edit the color of a color stop by clicking on it, which displays the color editing popup, and editing the color in that popup. Colors in gradients are allowed to have translucency, which you can adjust with the opacity slider in the color popup.
Adding color stop
A gradient must have at least two color stops, but it can have more than that. To add a stop, either click on the bar, or click in the space where the color stops go, anywhere there isn’t already a color stop. The color stop added will have an initial color equal to the color that was already in that position in the gradient. A new color stop doesn’t affect the appearance of the gradient until you either move it or change its color. If you create a new stop between two existing stops and just move it one way to the other, you are essentially accelerating the gradation of one part of the range and slowing it in the other part of the range.
Deleting color stops
If there are more than two color stops in a gradient, you can delete one by clicking it and dragging to the left or right, off the bar, until it disappears. (The color stop will not follow the mouse off the bar, it will just be deleted when the mouse is far enough away.) If you did not mean to delete the color stop, just move the mouse back toward the bar until it reappears before releasing the mouse button.
Linear Gradients
A linear gradient looks like an area filled with parallel lines, each one a slightly different color from the previous one. They can fill the rectangular enclosing bounds of whatever they are drawn in at any angle. The angle of the gradient is indicated by the white arrow in the gradient preview. You can change the angle by clicking and dragging anywhere within the preview. While you are dragging, the angle snaps to horizontal and vertical angles and 45 degree diagonal angles when it is near them to make it easier to hit these regular angles. You can suppress this snapping by holding down the Command key.
Radial Gradients
A radial gradient looks like an area filled with concentric circles, each one a slightly different color from the last one. The center point can be anywhere inside the rectangular bounds of the area being filled. You can change the center point of the gradient by clicking anywhere within the gradient preview and dragging. While you are dragging, the center point snaps to the horizontal or vertical center of the area if it gets close to it. You can suppress this snapping by holding down the Command key.