kyoy! in this one i'll keep my explanations short, because i'm kind of in a hurry. sorry if you wanted more details... how to go from this:
to this:
in PS7. involves selective coloring, so it's only partially translatable to PSP or GIMP, sorry =( feel free to check my tutorials guide-- someone else might've made a tutorial that can replicate this effect in other programs. also, keep in mind that this still does not work with every picture. play with the settings if you can.
***PLEASE DON'T COPY THIS EXACTLY!*** try to learn what i think while i'm making these instead of just copying and pasting every single layer onto your images, ok?
base_ here it is. i ran auto contrast and auto color as necessary, but just that. no sharpening until the end.
soft light_ to give it more brightness & contrast, i duplicated my base, upped the brightness of the duplicate by about 40, and the contrast by about 20. then i gaussian blurred it with a radius of about 4, and set that layer on soft light. here's the layer and what the result looks like after:
screen_ to lighten it up, i duplicated my base once again, dragged the copy on top of the other layers and set it on screen. here's what that looked like:
color burn_ nat's skin is tanned, so the icon gets an overall yellow tone, right? i wanted to put in some blue, so i flood-filled a new layer with a light cyanish-blue (#C2FFF8) and set it on color burn. i lowered the opacity just enough that it was noticeable without turning the icon green-- an opacity of 35%.
soft light 2_ she was still a bit too yellow, i wanted her skin to be a more fleshy tone. so i flood-filled a new layer with a light purple/pink (#F1B3FF) and set it on soft light. this also brightened up the icon a lot. i lowered the opacity of the layer until it wasn't TOO washed out, at 70%.
hue/saturation_ i wanted the colors to pop out, so i inserted a hue/saturation adjustment layer, increasing the master saturation by 40. this made her face way too orange, so i adjusted that in the vector mask that accompanies the hue/sat layer, like i explained in my previous tutorial, step 5. i used a soft round brush and painted over her face in black, at about 50% strength. here's the result:
color balance_ i was liking the pinkish hues, actually, i just wanted to make them darker and deeper (without losing the lovely cyan color of her shirt), so i inserted a color balance layer with these settings:
midtones: 70/50/30
shadows: 100/55/100
this gives it an overall purple/magenta-ish tone, as you can see here:
multiply_ the column behind her was waaaay too white and bright; it should correspond a little better with her tones, so i flood-filled a new layer with a medium brown/tan color (#E1AE75) and set it on multiply. this darkened everything, but i didn't want it to be too dark, so i lowered the opacity to 35%.
color burn 2_ just to make the shadows a little darker, i flood-filled a new layer with cyan (#6DCFF6) and set it on color burn, again. i kept the opacity low, at 10%, just so it was barely noticeable. i didn't want to lose the pink.
selective color 1_ time to bring some of the blue in the background back in. these were my settings:
reds: -100/0/100/0
yellow: -15/0/-30/0
neutrals: 30/0/-40/0
reds for the "blush factor," 30 in neutrals to make the blues pop, the rest in the yellows to keep her from becoming completely orange. she was still looking a bit too bright, though, so i fixed that with the vector mask, just like i did in the "hue/saturation" step.
selective color 2_ i still felt the background could be bluer without losing the pink on her, so i added a very simple SC layer that i have saved up in my hard drive. it basically makes the overall icon bluer.
neutrals: 100/-22/-48/0
and there you go, the finished icon. here's the layers palette, in case you got lost somewhere along the way.
i hope you found this tutorial useful, and i would love to see your results, so please comment! if you have any questions at all, don't hesitate to ask. and if you like my icons/graphics and/or want to know how i made them, be sure to step by
wakizashi_. i'd be glad to help you ^^ 
