Using my monochrome icon light textures

Posted on March 28, 2005 at 02:16 am under Tutorials and Tips

Software Used: Adobe Photoshop 6.0

After receiving a lot of requests for an explanation on how I used my Monochrome Spotlights texture set for the example icon I posted, I thought I’d take a bit of time to put up a tutorial on it. The tutorial will show you the bare minimum effect that you can achieve without really doing anything fancy at all. We’ll be covering this:

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Step 01: Pick Your Base and Texture

First, find a picture you want to use and do the usual resizing and adjustments to obtain your base image. Assuming that you already know how to do that, I’ll be skipping right on. For this tutorial, we’re starting with this:

This base image should go at the bottom-most layer of your working canvas since we’re going to be stacking up the layers from here onwards.

The color of the image looks rather washed out and dull, so we’re going to see what we can do to boost it a little. Now, there are ten thousand billion ways to fix that image and this would normally be where I explain the process. In this case, however, we’re skipping that step and going with the lazy man’s route to jump right ahead and start with one of the light textures.

Pick a texture and work with it

This is the one I used for the icon:

Paste the above texture on top of your image base as a new layer. Don’t worry about your base image disappearing under the texture. Set the layer blend mode of the texture layer to Overlay and your base shows through again, see? We also see that setting it to Overlay has brightened and sharpened your base up considerably, so now we have this:

Better already. But we can do just a bit more, so let’s move on to the next step.

Step 02: Adding Minor Touches

Although we’re going for a simple icon here, the image is still a bit plain and doesn’t quite catch your eye. Going for a subtle and simple boost, let’s just add a little bit of the infamous scanline effect. Yes yes, ancient trend...but we don’t care about being trendy right now! :D Here’s a transparent one I threw together:

Again, we’re pasting this as a layer and it should go on top of the previous two layers. Set the scanlines layer blend mode to Overlay.

Adjusting the scanlines effect

You’ll notice that the black lines are way too prominent and they’re covering up our subjects. To easily fix this, adjust the Opacity of the scanlines layer until you’re satisfied with the result. In my example, I adjusted it to 28% and now I have this:

Duplicate and brighten the icon

I thought the icon still looked a bit dim, so we’ll brighten it up a tad bit. There are many ways you can do this, but for something quick and easy, we’ll just duplicate the original base layer we started out on: Layer > Duplicate Layer or you can also right click to select the option.

After you’ve duplicated the base layer, drag it to the top of all your other layers. So with your duplicated base sitting on the top-most layer, set its blend mode to Soft Light. Depending on how bright you want it, you can adjust the layer’s Opacity. For this tutorial, I adjusted it to 71% so the effect is very subtle. I didn’t include the result, but you’ll see it on the next step.

We’re almost done now. Just the finishing touches left!

Step 03: Prepping and Adding Text

Since I plan on adding an almost-white colored text on the bottom of the icon, I prefer the area to be just a tad darker in order to cancel the light effect a bit and make text show more. What I did was crop a darker bit of one of my light textures with some gradient effect into a small portion like this so that it’ll blend smoother:

Paste that as a layer on top of all the previous layers. Position the cropped texture on the bottom where we’ll be adding the text, then set the blend mode to Overlay. You should now see that the area has gotten just a bit darker.

Now it’s ready for text

I added my text using the font, Arial Narrow, at 7pt and 6pt respectively, with character tracking set at 75. Here’s what we have so far:

At this point, you can either declare the icon finished or if you fancy a border, you can also go a step further.

Step 04: Adding a Border (Optional)

I wanted to enclose the icon, but I also didn’t want a border that’s too flat or prominent. In fact, I wanted something very subtle where you can barely tell it’s there. This is the one I chose to use:

Now, something like this is normally used as a brush- but for this icon, I didn’t bother turning it into a brush. Rather, I used it as a layer. Placing the border layer right underneath the text layers, set the layer blend mode to Color Dodge and adjust the Opacity to 70%. So that gives us the finished product:

And we’re done! This was my first time writing a tutorial for icons, so I hope it was fairly easy to understand and that you found it useful.

Conclusion & Quick Tips

Generally with light textures, just remember that it tends to work well as a layer, set to either Overlay, Screen, or Lighten blend mode depending on the icon and style. There are, of course, exceptions to that but it’s something to keep in mind. Everything else usually comes down to just tweaking the different layers, adjusting colors or brightness, etc.

This tutorial was originally written 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.