Re: Linear gradients, Transforms and angles...

On Sep 23, 2010, at 12:13 AM, Brad Kemper wrote:

>> I could not find a way to ask Photoshop for a gradient at a specified angle (it seems you always click and drag),
> 
> Create a gradient layer, or double-click on any layer and create a "gradient overlay" layer style. They both allow you to specify degrees by typing a number, and they all work in the old familiar way. Adobe Illustrator and InDesign have similar controls that interpret the degrees in the same way. So if Adobe ever gets around to putting gradients into DreamWeaver, I would expect the control to follow the same familiar standard. It would certainly be weird for 45° to mean something different in DreamWeaver than in every other Adobe CS app, but I guess in theory the UI could show 45° while the code gets written as 315°. But, God, I hope not; that would be confusing to make sense of when reading the code. 

By the way, PhotoShop also lets you transform by angle (select something, choose "Free Transform" from the "Edit" menu, then type an angle into the Options bar). These angles are clockwise rotations. Yet I've never heard of anyone being confused by the discrepancy of how rotational transforms follow the left-hand rule of thumb and the linear gradient directions don't. More people would be confused if either the positive rotation was not as a clock motion, or if the linear directions of gradients did not follow the conventions of "high school geometry".  Having unconventional systems for specifying these two very different things (which happen to both require dividing a circle into 360 parts) would be far more confusing than having them match at some more abstract level.

Received on Thursday, 23 September 2010 07:29:57 UTC