The lighting is excellent, and your masking is very good, too.
I especially like 1 and 8 and 9, because they have that kinda flat matte coloring that I personally love. But the less flat ones (5 and 7 especially) look great to me, too. The composition in both 5 and 10 is great.
One thing that you might want to look into is sharpening artefacts around the masked characters. It's not very pronounced in your icons, the only one I really notice it in is #3.
What I always do is smooth out the artefacts at the very end. What you do is you create a stamp copy of your layers (if you need step by step explanations, let me know), then blur that copied layer with a simple Blur filter. Set the whole mask to black. Then go over the places you think look pixelated with a small white brush. -> blur only the places where you see blocky things.
I have an action that does this, if you're interested. Do you even use Photoshop?
(Also, just because that one took me *years* to find, Photoshop has a "Refine Mask" command (CTRL-ALT-R). It works on both mask layers and active selections. But it's not that versatile outside of single selections, so ymmv.)
no subject
The lighting is excellent, and your masking is very good, too.
I especially like 1 and 8 and 9, because they have that kinda flat matte coloring that I personally love. But the less flat ones (5 and 7 especially) look great to me, too. The composition in both 5 and 10 is great.
One thing that you might want to look into is sharpening artefacts around the masked characters. It's not very pronounced in your icons, the only one I really notice it in is #3.
What I always do is smooth out the artefacts at the very end. What you do is you create a stamp copy of your layers (if you need step by step explanations, let me know), then blur that copied layer with a simple Blur filter. Set the whole mask to black. Then go over the places you think look pixelated with a small white brush. -> blur only the places where you see blocky things.
I have an action that does this, if you're interested. Do you even use Photoshop?
(Also, just because that one took me *years* to find, Photoshop has a "Refine Mask" command (CTRL-ALT-R). It works on both mask layers and active selections. But it's not that versatile outside of single selections, so ymmv.)