Any Color You Like so Long as it's Black

One of the coolest options in Adobe Photoshop is the Fade Command. You'll find this in Photoshop's menubar, under Edit, like so:



The second part of the name, in this case, Gradient, will depend on what the last thing was you did. If you used a brush, filter, curves, or any of the other myriad commands and functions Photoshop has, then that will be the second half of the name.

You can think of the Fade Command as varying the Opacity of Undo. Undo is normally all or nothing - you can't 'undo' halfway, but you can get that effect using Fade.

Below is a brush stroke, done with 70% Opacity in the Options Bar. When you call up the Fade Command, you see it's set at 70%. If the Opacity for the Brush had been set to 20%, Fade would also be at 20%.



By adjusting it down to 18%, you can see the brush stroke is much lighter....



Conversely, you can also increase it to 100%...


You'll also notice that Fade often has Mode. You can change this to Screen, Multiply, or any other mode to increase or decrease the effects.

Fade works on other things as well - grads for example....


Too dark? Adjust it!


Fade can be applied to just about anything in Photoshop - any art tool, filter, adjustment, and more. The only caveat, is that you have to use Fade right away - it only applies to the very last thing you did.

Now, instead of all or nothing undo, you can effectively adjust the opacity of undo, using Fade.

Next installment, I'll show you how to 'undo' only selected parts of what you last did, versus adjusting all of what you just did via Fade.