Hi Richard, Sorry for the delayed response. The color gradient in Carrara probably behaves a little differently than you might expect. It's real purpose is to add color to grayscal operators (like marble or noise operators), not to actually be used like you use regular color in the color channel. That's why there is a shader sub channel - you pick an already made (by you) black and white shader that the color will be applied to. For an example, open up one of the stone shaders and examine how they've built the color channel. For the translucency channel you'll need to multiply in a grayscale gradient instead of a color gradient. Mark