tricks and tips for making light textures

for anyone who's interested, I've explained an easy way to achieve these effects over at my journal (Photoshop 7.0, btw)
it's actually not that hard and with adjusting the settings to your liking you can get stunning results.
I'm gonna show you the main technique and some variations, anything else is up to you. have fun :)

the big advantage of these textures is, that they don't change the colors of your icons too much and as the base color is 50% grey (which is the neutral color for screen and hard light blending mode and therefore not visible) they won't change the general lightness/darkness either. so yay, very handy! ;)