Need to know how to do a couple of effects on existing flag icons.

[Farflame]

I have a strip of world flags, which I got hold of a few years ago. They were all separate and I needed them in a long strip, so I painstakingly stuck them all together in paint.net. The problem is, as time has gone on, I need to update a couple of the flags, e.g Libya (has a new flag) and Northern Ireland (didn't have a flag in the set, so I just used the English flag).

 

Now I can easily get hold of the new flags and just paste them over the old one, but there are a couple of minor effects on the existing flag set that I don't know how to replicate. Here are two flags to show the old set and my newly pasted flag.

 

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/112519761/2flags.png

 

As you can see, the North Korean flag on the left has some sort of fading, going from lighter at the top to darker at the bottom. I've tried messing around with gradients but I can't really replicate it properly. It also has a single-pixel light square around the edge of the flag which mine doesn't. Again, I don't know how to replicate this.

 

I'm not asking for someone to do it for me, because I need to update the Libya flag too and as flags change over the years, I'd like to know how to do this myself. Could anyone give me a few pointers on how I achieve these two effects on my flags?

[Eli]

Farflame, I used three layers to reproduce more or less the effect.

 

The flag is at the bottom.

I added a layer above it and painted it with a black and white gradient. I changed the layer mode to additive.

On the upper layer I drew a white rectangle with the shapes tool. Then I chose gradient again and changed on the menu bar from color mode to transparency mode. I applied the gradient to this layer and that is it.   I hope this is what you need.

 

Edited November 12, 2015 by Eli

[Farflame]

Perfect, thanks very much, works just as needed