: Gradient tool in Photoshop not even blend? When you make a gradient in PS, for example a black to white gradient going across the screen, it seems that it is not an even blend from black

@Rambettina927

That depends a lot on the recipe you used for black and your other settings in your profile.

When you say black, that could mean many different black (#000000 or K100 or C75-M65-Y25-K80)

I'm more of a print person so I don't really do any color management in RGB and I find it easier to evaluate the results of how the colors will look like in CMYK. But if this can help to understand what's going on, I made some samples to show you different type of black to show how they react when used in a gradient.

In your graphic, your black is not really black. It's a mix of colors that looks like black. You have other colors that are distributed from the start to end of your gradient, and they multiply each others. So they will saturate the mid-tone of your gradient.

In RGB there is no true black; the "real" black is #000000 . But this black is still a mix of all the red-green-blue at 100%, and a very rich black in CMYK.

I made a gradient in RGB mode using only K100 and here is the histogram. The nice curve is there.



And here are the different black, all in CMYK mode. You will notice how some fill the mid part more than others. You can also see how the RGB black is really "thick"!



And here is the channels screenshot to show how the other colors in the different black are mixed with the true black. You can see which color is saturating the middle part of the gradient.





Bottom line: If you want a nice smooth and well balanced black gradient, you should try to remove the other color saturating it in the middle, use the real black at 100% and find what you prefer. It's probably easier using the CMYK color values even if you're in RGB mode.



Extra note on gradient with black for printing:

If you use a black with gradient for printing, be careful to add some of the other color too, otherwise you will see some "steps" between each shade of black as if the gradient was very low resolution! Same will happen if you do a light gray gradient when printing in Pantone or one color only. In that case, you shouldn't even make a long gradient; if you have a gray at 30% black to 0% on a 10" sheet for example, the gradient will be visibly split into 30 slices of gray of 0.3" each! Horrible result!

It's also good to add on your gradient some noise (2.0) and then gaussian blur (0.5) to get a nice smooth gradient and hide the "steps".

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