Independent software development house Kerlin Softworks announced today the release of Gradient Thief, a free gradient editor that lets users sample existing images to create gradient swatches for use in 3D animation, web pages, and print media.
Gradient Thief allows users to easily create, edit, and manipulate multi-color gradients. It allows for the sampling of existing images to create gradients that “remove” foreground obstructions such as trees, buildings and even clouds. Users can export raw gradient positional data for game and multimedia development.
Kerry Lindner, president of Kerlin Softworks, announced the free release as a preview of “a very small piece” of their next product still in development. “As 3D artists, we’ve often found a background image that we wanted to incorporate into a scene. The sky in the background would be fantastic but a lot of these images were of insufficient resolution or had obstructions which didn’t fit the mood of the scene. We created Gradient Thief as a tool for extracting some of the key colors that contributed to the feel of the scene and exporting them as a gradient swatch of a larger size.”
