Your new gradient tool is AWFUL!!!!

Same complaint here. I work at a company that rhymes with Fisney as a concept artist, and boy oh boy do I hate that. I use gradients nonstop in painting, I tend to lock pixels and then make the gradient for a nice blended effect with one color on one side and NO color on the other side, and now the hotkey doesn't work at all. It keeps trying to get me to use 2 colors at least, instead of one color and then transparent pixels which many of us use in our office. It really.... really slows us down. If Photoshop 2023 is going to force that annoying Beta box to appear everywhere, the least they can do is not to fix something that wasn't broken in the first place.

I have to get on board with this, ever since CC long standing tools have routinely gone haywire. Having a STATIC GRADIENT IS USELESS, and I don't need a preview with extra UI, Or a tool that just sits there open waiting for me to mess with it. Gradien DROP DONE. I just need tools to work. Seriously, Adobe! you are breaking the programs and driving us to find better solutions. Stop listening to whoever is telling you to change your tools all the time! 

I agree. Adobe please stop making changes like this. Don't have time to spent mucking around tyring to figure out what's 'gone wrong' when I commit to an urgent job that is supposed to be quick and turns out to be a drama because of unnecessary changes you have made.

I just spent too much time in my life trying to figure out how to reverse the gradient tool, realizing I literally need to install a previous version in order to do my professional work.

By @Corinne5D3A

No, it isn’t literally necessary to do that.

I understand your frustration; the first time I worked with the new gradients I could not find some options. But as soon as I realized that Adobe did the smart thing and consolidated all of the options into the Properties panel…I was very happy. Everything in one place!

Many of us here are also trainers/educators, and for years we have been asking Adobe to modernize the gradients. Up until now, configuring Photoshop gradients could require a stack of nested dialog boxes up to three deep (see the left example in the picture below). It was like working with a UI from over a quarter of a century ago…because that is exactly what it was. It was an obstacle to efficiency, because not only might you have to open multiple dialog boxes just to edit a certain option, it meant that to finish editing a gradient, sometimes you click three OK buttons (or hit the Enter key three times) to get all the way out of the stack of dialog boxes. And on top of all that, when working on a small screen like a laptop, the multiple dialog boxes often got in the way of the image itself! (You can clearly see that in the left example too.) What a mess it was.

Other current software is much more streamlined than that. So if you want to know why they changed, it, that’s why: They had to update the old 20th century UX into the present, as many of us had been asking Adobe to do for years.

Photoshop 24.5 finally caught up to other modern software. Adobe made gradient options available in the Properties panel, greatly reducing the need to go in and out of dialog boxes. As long as you have the Properties panel open, it’s all right there in front of you…including the Reverse option you were looking for (see the right example in the picture below). Also, the Reverse option is still in the options bar when the Gradient tool is active. And, the gradient stops are now right there on the gradient itself, making them easier to understand and control. All without blocking the image…finally!

Another powerful advantage of the new way is being able to use a gradient on a mask, and nondestructively. That is a compelling reason to make a gradient a vector object. We are no longer subject to the inconvenience of having to completely redo a mask gradient from scratch only because we wanted to make a slight adjustment to it. So if you want to know why Adobe changed gradients, that is why. They are a thousand times better now.

And it is worth teaching that to your students. They’ve been exposed to other current mobile and desktop apps where gradients are highly interactive and nondestructive. In other words, the new way Photoshop does gradients is more consistent with what students will expect, having seen other modern apps. The old Photoshop gradients will seem unusually inflexible and convoluted.

If you are working with a gradient fill layer, you can still work with the options the old slow way: Just double-click the gradient thumbnail in the Layers panel.

Now, maybe there is something you used to do that still doesn’t work right in the modern gradients. Ask us about that and we might find a way. Or, as jane-e showed earlier, you can switch it back to the Classic Gradients. Without having to install an old version.

One huge gotcha to installing older no longer available from Adobe versions of Photoshop like CC 2019 is that your installing the base CC 2019 with no updates and no practical way to get the updates that were provided when CC 2019 was still supported by Adobe, so you actually might have more bugs in the older CC 2019 (ps ver 18.0) version than the latest 2023 (ps ver 24.5).

Then there's the compatibilty issue on Macs with Apple Silicon Processors.