Using color light textures on black & white

Posted on June 18, 2006 at 02:10 am under Tutorials and Tips

Software Used: Adobe Photoshop CS

This was a requested tutorial for one of the example usage icons I posted for the Color Highlights set. The following covers one very simple way of utilizing a bit of color with a black and white image to give it a little boost:

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Step 01: Getting Started with a Black and White Image

First, find a picture you want to use. It doesn’t matter if it’s in color or not. If it’s in color, you can Desaturate it by going to Image > Adjust > Desaturate or you can also switch the image mode by going to Image > Mode > Grayscale and then switching it right back to RGB mode again so that you can add color to it. They yield different results sometimes.

Anyhow, this is the base I’ll be starting out on:

As you can see, there are some stray text from the original picture, but we’ll worry about that later. For now, we leave it alone.

Adjusting the brightness and contrast

Sometimes you may feel that your grayscale image is a bit faded out for your taste. In that case, you can adjust the Brightness/Contrast by going to Image > Adjustments > Brightness/Contrast and giving it more definition. The amount you need to adjust will vary depending on the picture, so play around with it a bit. Here’s my result:

My setting was at -21 Brightness and +10 Contrast.

I purposely made it darker because it’ll make a difference when I add my texture later on (which will make it look more washed out).

Step 02: Applying the Texture

To boost the base with a nice dash of color, let’s use this particular texture:

Set the layer blend mode to Screen and here’s the result so far:

Now that we have the color, all that’s left is a bit of cleaning up and adding finishing touches. Let’s move on!

Step 03: Cleaning Up and Adding Text

Since I wanted to add some text and I also needed to get rid of the stray text on the top left corner of the image, I decided to use a basic Soft Round Brush to cover it up first. I chose the color black to make the coloring of the icon stand out more. So create a new layer and brush along the entire top portion until it looks about right- here’s the shape I drew:

And that gave me this:

Let’s add some text

After that’s all done, we can now add text. “Intrigue” was typed out in white with the font Baskerville Old Face at size 24pt and with Faux Bold selected. I also set the Tracking to 30 to widen the gaps between the letters and then I adjusted the Fill Opacity to 21%.

After that’s done, let’s add a bit of tiny text both on top and on the bottom of the word. For that, I used some from my ready-made tiny text set. And now I have this:

Some might decide that the icon is finished now, but I felt that it was still missing a bit of something…

Step 04: The Final Touch with a Border

This part is pretty much optional, but I personally didn’t like how light the bottom part of the icon was when compared to the top. To solve that problem, I selected a Soft Round Brush again, except a much smaller one this time, and quickly drew across the bottom edge of the icon like this:

Which finally gave me the finished product:

And we’re done! Simple, right? I hope I managed to explain it in an understandable manner and that you found it helpful!

This tutorial was also posted on my graphics journal at LJ. If you’re from LJ and you have any questions, you’re always free to ask or comment at the post over there as well.

Update!

October 23, 2006: I am now also accepting comments here, so I recommend asking here instead of over at LJ if you have any questions. The version of the tutorial over there is actually older so it might not contain certain information that the one posted here would.