Current mood:	accomplished
Current music:	Iceman - Lost Complex

Tutorial 004 :: How to make Light Textures
Alright I've been asked on how I make my light textures and maybe it'll suprise some people. I make all of my light textures in PSP9 but it should be fairly easy to do most of these steps in Photoshop.

We'll go from this to .


To start off you take a photo (yes any photo of anything will do) and I'll choose one of Miyavi simply because I like the coloring and the contrast in it to begin with. You'll want a photo with a lot of contrast because in light textures dark is good.

So I start off with this picture.

I want to get even more contrast so I go to Adjust -> Brightness and Contrast -> Brightness and Contrast and have my settings at Brightness -33 and Contrast 54. This makes my picture very dark... which is good! Look here.

Next I want to play with the coloring and go to Adjust -> Color Balance -> Color Balance and play with the setting till I have something like this. I know it looks horribly icky but well it's supposed to.

Now you may have to play a bit with the lighting to get some really bright area's. To do this go to Adjust -> Brightness and Contrast -> Curves. You should get something like this. Now your picture looks like this.

And the final preparation to the picture is to put a bit more contrast between the light and dark areas. Go to Adjust ->Brightness and Contrast -> Highlight/Midtone/Shadow and put your setting to something like this. Now your picture should look something like this and it's time to cut it into 100x100 portions.

So select your crop tool and go to areas where there's a good amount of light vs. dark. I chose my first place and cropped it to 100x100 square. Look Here.

Next I go to Adjust -> Blur -> Motion Blur and play with the settings till I'm happy and it looks something like this.

And that's basically it, you can of course go back, crop a new area, and make a ton of light textures from just one picture. It's all very simple :). Good luck making your own light textures!