Fill and Gradient Panel

The Gradient panel is host to PD Pro's fill settings, as well as the gradient editor.

The top portion of the panel is dedicated to fill settings, while the bottom section gives you your gradients.

The two are are on the same panel because both can be used to fill shapes.

 The section in the middle gives you some dithering options, and the fill modes.  Fill modes are similar to drawing modes, except that they are used by fill tools.
The top section gives us all of our fill types.  The first row is related to gradients, and the second is related to brush fills.
There are many ways to fill a shape with a gradient, and many types of gradients.

You can use any of the fill tools on the tool panel to fill a shape.

You can also use an alpha channel tool, and fill it either with the paint can, or by pressing the 'q' key.

That is the method that was used for all of these examples.  Pressing the 'q' key will fill the alpha selection with whatever fill mode you have selected on the Gradient/fill panel.

You can see in the examples the various modes offered.
In these examples, the second row of icons were used to select a brush warping mode.

Brush warping uses the current custom brush as an image or pattern.

Each mode warps the brush in different ways, as you can see.

You can achieve a nice globe by warping a brush of a map into a sphere using the 'warp both' mode.
  In the center of the panel, you have a control that adds some dithering to your fill.  This can be useful for breaking up gradients that might tend to look plain, otherwise.

Color dithering is used here.

 The Modes menu lets you select the fill mode that is used for filling shapes.  You will find these similar to drawing modes used by brushes, except that they are used by the fill tools.

Editing Gradients

You can use drag and drop to drop colors onto the area that looks like a ruler at the bottom, or you can sweep your mouse across the swatch to edit it manually.

 

 An opacity channel is included, so you can make parts of your fills transparent.  While the color channels can be created with drag and drop, you must edit the opacity channel manually.

You can see how part of this fill has become transparent.
There are times when you want to smooth out the curves you create when editing a gradient. Holding the Smooth button down will smooth out your curves until you let it up.

The Auto smooth button next to it will continue to smooth curves as you edit them until you de-activate it.
  The index slider lets you select or edit any one of 8 gradients.  Gradients come in sets of 8, so there can be lots of veriety. You can also load and save gradient sets.  There are quite a few that come installed.