Tips & tricks for Adobe InDesign: Cool effects with the soft gradient edge

In this little tutorial, I would like to show you how to create great effects with the Soft Gradient Edge option from the Effects panel.



I'll write some text, for example "PSD tutorials", and make the font black and larger. By holding down the Shift key, I can increase the font size in increments of ten.

Then I adjust the whole thing a little, ...

... until it looks like this:

I would now like to have a background that can be a single color and green.

I use Ctrl+O to bring the field into the background.

Now I want the text to contain transparent lines in certain places. To do this, I double-click on the Effects paneland have the option of setting a soft gradient edge.

It looks like this:





But that's not really how I wanted to do it. I wanted to create transparent strokes within the font.

I can do this as follows: I set the angle to 90° and everything that is black is faded in and everything that is white is not faded in.

The good thing is that I can create several color buckets. If I click on the black paint bucket and right next to it again, another black bucket is created next to it.

However, this then has an opacity of 80 % ...

... but I want an opacity of 100 %. So that's what I set.

If I now drag the second paint bucket right next to it, I get a really great, smooth vector edge. And so I have a transparent line.

Then I click again on the black paint bucket on the far left and create a new paint bucket by clicking right next to it. I drag it right next to the white one (i.e. the fourth from the left in the top view).

And then this is shown again in the font as a transparent line.

I can continue this as often as I like.

Here I set the opacity to 0 % ...

... and next to it one with opacity 100 % ...

... and then another one with an opacity of 100%, so I can create lots of strokes here.





This is a nice effect that I can apply not only to text, but also to all other objects ...

... for example, when I draw a star.

If I click on the star and drag the fx over it, I have a star that contains certain transparent elements.

I can change the direction of these at any time. All I have to do is turn the angle.

I can also make the transparent strokes softer with gradient points, that's no problem. Do it however you like.

As I said, if you move it very close together, you have smooth vector lines.

If I zoom in, however, you can see that it's not quite so smooth. I have to readjust it, then it's a complete vector line.

That's a nice thing and it's good to know that you can do it with the soft gradient edge.