Small White Tape

This is something fun that you can easily make from scratch and probably boast about your originality without using outside resources. Hence, I will try to be more detailed. Enjoy it!

Step 1: Make a new document size 180px by 80px and fill it with black. Use the Rectangular Marquee Tool to make a smaller, rectangular selection inside your document. Right click the selected area and choose Layer Via Copy and it should appear in your Layers tab above your black background. Cover Overlay the new layer (under blending options) with white color and merge it with a second blank new layer.

You should now have a selected white layer for the base of the tape and a black background layer.


Step 2: Take the Chalk 17 pixels brush and erase the left and right sides of the tape to make rough edges.


Step 3: Duplicate your tape layer and change the layer style Blend Mode to 20% normal opacity. Then on the same duplicated layer, do Filter --> Pixelate --> Mezzotint and choose Coarse Dots. You should have something similar to this:


Step 4: Next, to make the tape somewhat transparent, change the layer style Blend Mode of your original tape layer to your desired normal opacity. Between 60-80% is recommended for translucent tape. Between 30-50% is recommended for transparent tape. (You may adjust this later in this tutorial to meet your satisfaction) You may also experiment using the Screen Blend Mode, which will give a similar result in various cases. The image below shows a 65% normal opacity.


Step 5: If you feel that you have too many coarse dots on your tape, you can lessen them by doing Filter --> Noise --> Dust & Scratches with radius 1 pixel and threshold 0 levels - on the duplicated tape layer. The rest of this tutorial will not include sample images from this step, but the same instructions will work with or without this step.


Step 6: On your duplicated tape layer, do Filter --> Blur --> Gaussian Blur and set the radius to 0.6 pixels.


Step 7: You are done! In the case you want to Gaussian blur the entire tape to soften the rough edges, make sure you merge both original and duplicated tape layers together before blurring. As a result of this however, you will also blur the straight-way sides. To sharpen them again, use the Rectangular Marquee Tool and make two selections that just about covers both blurry edges of the tape. Hold down the Shift key while adding the second selection in order to keep the first selection intact. Once you have your selections carefully executed, hit the Delete key and deselect.


Utilizing the tape: Here is a quick example of how to use the tape. The normal opacity here is 75%.