In this article, well take a look at some free photo overlays that you can download right now. The right photo overlay can really take an image from ordinary to extraordinary. If your Foreground and Background colors are set to their defaults, with your Foreground color being black and the Background color being white, you'll see your image temporarily mapped to black and white. 100+ Free Photoshop Overlays and Textures. In fact, if we wanted, we could map the entire tonal range of an image to a rainbow of colors! And since we're working with gradients, Photoshop creates smooth transitions between the colors we've chosen.īy default, the Gradient Map uses your current Foreground and Background colors as the colors for the gradient. They can be used to add light, lens flares, snow, rain, noise, fog, and many other different types of effects. Or we can take it a step further and map a third color to the midtones in between. Overlays are a great way to add character and balance to your photos, easily. For example, we can use a Gradient Map to assign one color to the darker areas (the shadows) and another color to the lighter areas (the highlights). It lets us map, or assign, different colors of a gradient to different tonal or brightness values in the image. Photoshop's Gradient Map adjustment gets its name from what it does. The Layers panel showing the Gradient Map adjustment layer. Visit Sky Replacement Pack for over 1000 royalty-free, pro-quality skies covering all times of day and atmospheric conditions.