Drawing gradient over image in ios

Question

How to create gradient colour look like following image programatically.

Answer 1

I just wrote an UIImage extension for Swift 2.0. Maybe it's of some use. You call it with an array of UIColor (any number) and a frame where the gradient should be drawn.

extension UIImage {

    class func convertGradientToImage(colors: [UIColor], frame: CGRect) -> UIImage {

        // start with a CAGradientLayer
        let gradientLayer = CAGradientLayer()
        gradientLayer.frame = frame

        // add colors as CGCologRef to a new array and calculate the distances
        var colorsRef = [CGColor]()
        var locations = [NSNumber]()

        for i in 0 ... colors.count-1 {
            colorsRef.append(colors[i].CGColor as CGColorRef)
            locations.append(Float(i)/Float(colors.count-1))
        }

        gradientLayer.colors = colorsRef
        gradientLayer.locations = locations

        // now build a UIImage from the gradient
        UIGraphicsBeginImageContext(gradientLayer.bounds.size)
        gradientLayer.renderInContext(UIGraphicsGetCurrentContext()!)
        let gradientImage = UIGraphicsGetImageFromCurrentImageContext()
        UIGraphicsEndImageContext()

        // return the gradient image
        return gradientImage
    }
}

Call it like this:

let colors = [
    UIColor.blueColor(),
    UIColor.greenColor()
    // and many more if you wish
]
let gradientImage = UIImage.convertGradientToImage(colors, frame: navigationBar.bounds)

and apply with:

.backgroundColor = UIColor(patternImage: gradientImage)

or

.setBackgroundImage(gradientImage, forBarMetrics: .Default)