Flying Snow icon - Photoshop 5.5
Hi everyone. Been a member of the community for a couple of months now, and I want to take a quick second to thank everyone for their gracious sharing of tips and tutorials. There's so much beautiful work here; I'm constantly astounded by the kindness, creativity and artistry shown on a daily basis. So, thank you, all! :)
First tutorial, so if I'm unclear on something ( or TOO explanative! LOL! ), please feel free to ask ( or tell! ), because I'm working from memory here, off my psd file. I use my old dinosaur PS 5.5, but I think this would readily be transferrable to PSP. :)
dandelow asked about this icon, so I figured I'd give this "tutorial" thing a go. :DLearn how I made this icon of Flying Snow from the movie "Hero":
1) I started with THIS cap, taken by myself. ( Trying to save bandwidth by not directly posting the cap! :) )
Steps 2-4 are the most affected by my working from the old psd file, because I'd saved the base image as flattened.
2) I rotated the image approximately 10 degrees counterclockwise ( IMAGE>ROTATE CANVAS>ARBITRARY>10 degrees CCW ).
3) Using the rectangular marquee option set at CONSTRAINED ASPECT RATIO ( 10:10 ), I selected the image I wanted to use, cropped it ( IMAGE>CROP ), and resized it to 100X100 pixels ( IMAGE>IMAGE SIZE> 100:100 ).
4 ) I sharpened the image ( FILTER>SHARPEN>SHARPEN ).
I'm pretty sure at this point I tweaked the contrast a bit with an adjustment layer ( LAYER>NEW>ADJUSTMENT LAYER>BRIGHTNESS/CONTRAST>CONTRAST +5 ). Then, I added another adjustment layer ( LAYER>NEW>ADJUSTMENT LAYER>SELECTIVE COLOR>set the color menu to BLACK>BLACK +16 ish ) to make her hair and features stand out more. And finally flattened the image to get this:
Which is now the BASE IMAGE. :)
5) Because I knew I wanted to do some glowy-type stuff later, I went ahead and made a copy of Snow only, before messing around with color. I selected Snow by using the color range option, since the blue sky was relatively uniform ( SELECT>COLOR RANGE ). I checked the INVERT box, because I wanted to remove the blue sky background and clicked on the upper right hand corner of the image ( the sky ). I set the fuzziness slider at somewhere near 118 ( you can play with this ) and clicked okay.
You'll notice now that Snow is mostly selected ( we'll call this layer transparent snow ). I hit ctrl-C to copy the selection, then ctrl-V to paste it as a new layer that looks like:
( note: in above image, I pasted the layer onto a checked background, so you could see the transparency. )
Keep this layer at NORMAL, 100%. We don't want to color her face much with the next step, but the transparency afforded by the color range selection will allow a bit to peak through her robes.
6) Above the base image, but BELOW the transparent snow layer, I created a new layer and filled it with a gradient from
crumblingwalls: 
Set to COLOR 100% and you have:
7) I duplicated the transparent snow layer and applied a gaussian blur of 3. ( FILTER>BLUR>GAUSSIAN BLUR>3 ). I set this layer to SCREEN. I then applied a layer mask ( go HERE if you're not familiar with layer masks ) and decreased the amount of blur over her eyes. Only her eyes.
8) I duplicated the GAUSSIAN BLURRED transparent snow layer, and set that to SOFT LIGHT.
9) You'll notice that her face and hair have lost a lot of definition. So, I duplicated the original ( non-blurred ) layer of transparent snow, moved it above all the other layers and desaturated it ( ctrl-shift-U or IMAGE>ADJUST>DESATURATE ). And set this layer to OVERLAY 100% to get:
10) I created a new layer to apply a border. I selected a color from
crumblingwalls gradient above - C62819, and used a brush from 
peaz_inc. 
I usually mess around with the blending modes on the brushes, but this time I kept the brush at NORMAL, 100% and began moving the brush layer through different levels on the icon. I decided that I liked the way it looked just UNDER all of the BLURRED transparent snow layers, except for the bit that was over Snow's face.
So, I created a layer mask and removed the portion of the brush that was covering her face. You could also use your eraser tool here, too. I just prefer to work with layer masks. :)
11) The icon looks pretty good, but it seemed to be missing something in the upper right hand corner. Since the cap is from the movie "Hero", I decided I wanted to put that somewhere on the icon. I tried just using the word hero, but that didn't do it for me. So, I googled the chinese symbol for hero and opened that image up in PS.
Not to get confusing here, but I used the magic wand to select the black symbol ( it was black against a white background ), copied it, and pasted it as a new layer on my icon palette. I resized the symbol ( EDIT>TRANSFORM>NUMERIC ) to a size I liked.
I decided that I didn't like the stark black color, so i tweaked the coloring by using the variations adjustment ( IMAGE>ADJUST>VARIATIONS ) and adding some red and magenta ( again, I apologize, I can't remember exactly which settings I used ).
I set this symbol layer to MULTIPLY, 85%, and moved it BELOW the brush layer ( messing around with layer placements is fun! :) ).
12) FINALLY, the last step ( you can all breathe a sigh of relief! ). I added a new layer at the top and created a 1px border ( ctrl-A, EDIT>STROKE>1px INSIDE ) using the color C62819. I set this layer to MULTIPLY, 100%
et voila!
Sorry if this was overly wordy... I wanted to make sure newer people as well as more experienced members could follow along. If you have any C & C about how I could make the tutorial better, please let me know. I'd love to be able to take away some knowledge on tutorials here, too! :D
Thank you, again, to everyone. :D