Tutorial 01: Icon Using Monochrome Light Texture
I got several requests for tutorials explaining how to use the light textures I posted last week, so I figured I'd whip an easy one up. Here's the first tutorial using the sample icon I gave for the monochrome set. A bare minimum effect that'll get you from base to final product of this U2 icon:

Base: Final:

Difficulty/Level: Easy; Beginner with at least basic PS or PSP knowledge.



Intro: This tutorial is written with the basis of solely using my monochrome light textures without using much additional effects. While it's simple and geared towards beginners, it's also written with the assumption that you have some basic knowledge of your image editing software. So when I say setting a layer to Overlay, I'm going to assume you know what I mean. Otherwise this tutorial will be really long and I'd be explaining the workings of Photoshop more than how to apply the light textures. :p But if you don't know how to do that or have any questions, feel free to comment and ask. And if you're seriously a stranger to your PS work area, you can take a look at this page for some intro help as well. Btw, I use Photoshop 6.0 so my tutorial was written for that, but I'm pretty sure the idea is easily translated for use in PSP or other similar softwares/versions.

Basic Usage: To begin, the light textures can be used upon download- meaning after you've unzipped them, the different images can be used as layers on whichever image editing software you use. Some people were confused about whether it'd work on PSP so I'll say now that they're compatible with PSP, PS, or whatever you use since the files are just jpeg pictures. And you don't need to convert them into brushes, gradients, etc. You can if you want to convert them, but for this tutorial- I'm going to cover how to use them as it is the way you get them from the zipped file.

Tutorial #01: U2 Icon Using Monochrome Light Texture Set 01 (textures are here)

I found a picture I wanted, resized and cropped it down to 100x100. I'm going to assume you know how to do all that already so I'm going to skip the redundant info. ^^; This is the image we're using for this tutorial:


Step 01.
We begin with the image base above- which is going to be your bottom-most layer. The color's all washed out and blegh so we're just going to see what we can do to boost it a little. Now, there are ten thousand billion ways to fix that image but we'll go with the lazy man's route and jump right to starting out with one of the light textures. I chose this one:


This layer should go on top of the base and set to Overlay blend mode, because otherwise, your base disappears and we wouldn't want that would we? Setting it to Overlay will also brighten and sharpen your base up considerably. So now we have this:


Better already. But not quite so let's move on to the next step.

Step 02.
Although we're going for a simple icon here, the image is still a bit plain and doesn't quite catch your eye. So let's just add a little bit of the scanline effect. Yes yes, it's been done a billions times and you're all going to scream "ANCIENT TREND!!" at me but we don't care about being trendy right now do we? xD Here's the one I'm using:


This layer goes on top of the previous two layers and should be set to Overlay as well. But yikes, the black lines are all over Bono's face and he's too cute to hide. Which means you'll have to adjust the Opacity until you're satisfied. I adjusted it to 28%, which gives me this:



Step 03.
I thought the icon still looked a bit dim. So to brighten it up yet a bit more, let's duplicate the original base layer- the very first untouched image we started out with. Now move the duplicated layer on top of all those layers we added in the previous steps. So...

goes on top of which means your duplicated base should now be your top-most layer.

Set the layer's blend mode to Soft Light and adjust the Opacity accordingly. Mine's set at 71%. Sorry, I didn't post the result image but it's basically a little brighter. We're almost done. Finishing touches now so let's move on to the next step.

Step 04.
Since I'm adding an almost white colored text on the bottom of the icon, I prefer it to be just a tad darker down there to cancel out the light effect a bit. So I've basically cropped one of my light textures so that it's only a small portion like this:


This layer should go on top of all the previous layers and set to Overlay. I add my text which will then give me this:



Step 05.
We're just adding the border now to finish the icon. I'm sorry to say I don't know whose border this is- I normally know, but this one somehow became a stray in my computer and I can't pick out from the top of my head, which user in my resources page this belonged to. -_-; I'm really sorry- if anyone knows, please tell me! Anyhow, this is the border we're using:


Set the layer mode to Color Dodge and the Opacity to 70%, which gives us the final finished product:



And we're done! This is my first time writing a tutorial for icons so I hope it wasn't too confusing. The icon was a really simple one so here's to hoping that the steps were easy to understand. :p

Afternote Quick Tip: Generally with light textures, just remember that it tends to work best as a layer set to either Overlay, Screen, or Lighten mode depending on the icon and style. Everything else usually comes down to just tweeking the different layers and duplicating them. And while this tutorial covers the steps applicable to this icon in order to give you an idea about how you can play with light textures- the quick tip to remember is that light textures are, more often than not, used with Overlay or Screen. There are exceptions, yes- so don't bite my head off about this! You can set them to whatever blending mode you wish to get all sorts of different effects of course. >_>;;

Please let me know if this tutorial helped you. If it did and I get enough interest, I'll probably post a more complicated tutorial for my Gradient Color Light Textures set with the sample icons like the ones seen on the bottom of this page.