Tutorial: Working with the New Gradient Tools in Adobe Premiere Pro CC 2018

Welcome to this tutorial on exploring new gradient features in Adobe Premiere Pro CC 2018. In an earlier tutorial, we showed you some ways of adding gradients and effects with After Effects and Premiere Pro, but recently, Adobe released some new features that allow you to add gradients to shape layers with the essential graphics tool set.

Creating a New Shape Layer

Let's start with an open Premiere Pro project sequence. Make sure you have enabled the view options to see the Essential Graphics panel. You can see this option by going to Window in the toolbar and choosing Essential Graphics (Figure 1, below).

Figure 1. Opening the Essential Graphics panel from the Window pull-down

Next, we're going to add a new shape layer to our sequence by navigating to graphics in the toolbar, New Layer, and then choosing Rectangle (Figure 2, below).

Figure 2. Creating a new shape layer

With this shape layer on our timeline, we can click in the color picker next to the fill option near the bottom of our Essential Graphics panel. This launches the color picker window.

Creating and Customizing the Gradient

At the very top of this menu, we can change the solid option to a gradient. I'll choose Radial (Figure 3, below). Now we can adjust the toggle settings to give us some different looks for this gradient. Adjusting the top toggle will alter the location of the gradient colors while the bottom toggle changes the opacity levels. You'll see a small preview of what the gradient will look like in this area (Figure 4, below Figure 3).

Figure 3. Choosing a Radial gradient

Figure 4. Adjusting the toggle settings

Down in the bottom section, you can change the color of the gradient with the color picker tool or by entering in the exact color ID or a hex code for a specific color. Once you have something you like, you can press OK to confirm your settings.

Back in the Program Monitor, we can further adjust the location and the opacity settings by selecting the dots and pooling them to the left or the right (Figure 5, below).

Figure 5. Adjusting the location and opacity settings

Next, I'm going to adjust the scale value of the shape so that it fills our screen (Figure 5, right column). The cool feature about this shape layer is that we can now play around and continue to change the gradient settings.

For example, we can continue to adjust the location and opacity toggles in the Program Monitor, or we can click the Fill Color picker and change things there. You can even change the gradient option from radial to linear to see what that looks like. Press OK to confirm any changes.

Adding Text to the Gradient

Next, you can add text to this gradient by choosing the Type tool and directly typing into the Program Monitor (Figure 6, below). From there, you can continue adjusting the gradient until you find something that works for your project. You can quickly copy and paste the shape layer to create a uniform look for your video.

Figure 6. Adding text

Adding Video

Next, we can add some video to our timeline and adjust the opacity settings of the shape layers to have them live on top of our video for a more stylized look (Figure 7, below).

Figure 7. The gradient on top of video

So, there you have it. There are lots of options to choose from when using this gradient workflow. It's pretty cool, it's quick, and an easy way to add some custom looks for your video titles, graphics, etc. Give these gradient features a try and add some depth to your next Premiere Pro project.