P: Gradient editor needs a few improvements

"change the orientation of each point or handle in colour space." makes no sense.

In the interests of fairness, here's Photoshop's effort with 100% smoothing applied. Still unacceptable.

In the interests of fairness, here's Photoshop's effort with 100% smoothness applied. Still unacceptable.

And I realize you can turn up the smoothness on Photoshop's gradient, but the artificial middle band remains highly visible.

I should add that it was faster to make the gradient using my tool than it was to use Photoshop's editor.

Let me give you a simple example. Suppose I'm trying to blend from orange (255,128,0) to blue (0,0,255) for a skyline or sunset. I need it to look smooth, so I'm trying to use as few control points as possible. In Photoshop by default it blends through desaturated purple to get there, which isn't physical. I want it to bend through light blue to simulate Rayleigh scattering. So I add a dim, pale cyan control point to the middle of the gradient. But now I have this ridiculous hard line in the middle of the gradient, making it look extremely artificial.

Here's photoshop's result:


And here's my tool's result (also: the desired result):

No, that's false. You can move the handles on te control points but you can't change the orientation of each point or handle in colour space. And you just can't make a smooth gradient that mimics (for example) a sky, a sunset, a spotlight, a flame, or any other emissive form of blending. I had to write myself a custom tool to do these things. It isn't hard to solve: one way is to allow users to make gradients in HSL and LAB colour spaces, and another way is to give users full control over the colour curve in 3-space, as I do in that tool.

It sounds like you haven't used the gradient editor - which does use splines, and can interpolate colors any way you like.