Paintstorm Studio — Gradient Maps & Adjustments

Overview / How it works

There are two ways to change color in Paintstorm, and choosing the right one is half the skill. A destructive edit — applying an adjustment straight onto a pixel layer — bakes the result in immediately. It's fast and light, but once you paint over it or move on, that decision is permanent. An adjustment-pass approach instead keeps the correction on its own layer above the artwork, so the pixels underneath are never touched. You can dial it back, mask it, reorder it, or throw it away tomorrow. For anything that sets mood, you want passes.

The star of mood control is the gradient map. It works by ignoring your image's existing colors entirely and reading only its luminance — how light or dark each pixel is. It then remaps that brightness onto a color ramp you define: the darkest tones pick up the color at the left of the ramp, the brightest tones the color at the right, and midtones blend between. Map shadows to a deep violet and highlights to a warm cream and a gray sketch instantly reads as candlelit. Because it keys off value, a gradient map only looks as good as your underlying value structure — which is exactly why painters block in values first.

Value does the work; color takes the credit. A gradient map can't invent form that your light-and-dark structure didn't already establish.

Curves are your value and contrast surgeon. The curve plots input brightness against output brightness; a gentle S-shape deepens shadows and lifts highlights for punchier contrast, while lifting the black point floods the shadows with air and haze. Working on the individual R, G and B channels lets you push color into the lights or shadows precisely — pull the blue channel's shadow end up for cool nighttime darks. Finally, HSL and selective color let you grab one band — say, only the greens — and shift its hue, saturation or lightness without disturbing the rest of the frame, ideal for retuning foliage or calming an overcooked skin tone.

Hands-on practice

Let's grade a finished-but-flat illustration into a warm, moody scene using a stack of reversible passes: a warm-shadow / cool-light gradient map, a contrast curve, and a targeted HSL nudge. Keep the original art untouched underneath the whole time.

1. Confirm your values first. Temporarily view the piece in grayscale (a desaturating pass, or the value check) and make sure lights, mids and darks are clearly separated. A gradient map amplifies whatever value structure exists — fix muddy values before grading, not after.
2. Add a gradient-map pass on top. Create the gradient map as a new adjustment layer above all artwork so it's non-destructive. Nothing below it is altered — you're viewing the art through the map.
3. Build a warm-shadow / cool-light ramp. Set the ramp's dark end to a warm desaturated brown-violet, the midpoint to a muted rose, and the light end to a cool pale cream. This "warm dark, cool light" split reads as intimate interior light. Reverse it (cool darks, warm lights) for open daylight instead.
4. Pull the opacity back. A gradient map at 100% usually looks synthetic. Drop the pass to 60–80% so the original local colors bleed through and the grade feels integrated rather than painted-over.
5. Stack a Curves pass for contrast. Add a Curves adjustment above the gradient map. Draw a soft S — anchor the midpoint, dip the shadows, lift the highlights — to restore the punch a gradient map can flatten.
6. Cool the shadows on a channel. Still in Curves, switch to the Blue channel and raise its dark end slightly. This pushes cool blue into the darks for atmosphere without touching the highlights.
7. Target one color with HSL. Add an HSL/selective pass and isolate a single band — say the greens of some foliage — then shift its hue toward teal and drop saturation a touch so it recedes and stops competing with your focal point.
8. Mask a pass to protect the focal point. On the gradient-map layer's mask, paint black over your character's face so the local skin color shows through at full strength while the environment stays fully graded. This is how you keep the hero reading while the world takes on mood.
9. Judge, then commit lightly. Toggle each pass on and off to confirm it earns its place. Leave the stack live for as long as you can; only flatten a copy for export, never your master file.

Demos & visual aids

Think of your corrections as a stack of transparent gels the viewer looks through, bottom to top. Order matters: each pass sees the combined result of everything below it.

Reach for the right tool by asking what you're trying to change — palette, value, or one specific color:

What you've learned

You can now steer a picture's entire mood from the top of the layer stack without ever risking the art below. You know a gradient map reads value and repaints it as a palette, that curves are your precision tool for contrast and color cast, and that HSL lets you fix one color band in isolation — all as stacked, masked, reversible passes.