Some simple filters/adjustments for your icons (PS)

I've compiled an extremely brief and simple list of effects that I commonly use in icons. I don't know if many others employ this, however, it is useful to at least me. :)

P.S. 56kers, feel free to view. Any "big" pictures are linked, and all pictures are compressed.

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Here (15kb) is the original picture that I will be working with to demonstrate. (Yes, I'm a 'Scaper.)

And of course, we crop it down to a nice 1:1 ratio for this: Horrendous crop (12kb)

So now we're left with this:

Of course the typical thing to do here is Sharpen (Filter>Sharpen>Sharpen):

Sometimes without sharpen, the picture looks too blurry but with it, it looks too harsh. What do we do? Fade! It reduces the effect of whatever you just did to the image. IE. Sharpening. It's found in Edit>Fade (Effect) and looks kinda like this (10kb):

(The effect is barely noticeable here, but with other pictures, the subtlety makes all the difference.)

Another type of sharpening is called "Unsharpen Mask". A lot of people hate this, because this thing likes it up the butt, and loves to refuse to cooperate at times. However, if you get kinda used to it (like a canker sore or something), it actually has its benefits. IE, I want to bring a picture more into focus, but I don't want to make it look all grainy from a typical "Sharpen" effect. Unsharpen Mask! Here! (24kb):

Levels (Image>Adjustments>Levels) is also a very popular effect in photo editing. Mostly, people just drag the left arrow to the right to bump up the contrast, but if you play with the settings (29kb), you can get a variety of different effects:

Now, to something not so common. In Image>Adjustments>Variations, you'll find this (86kb). You can click around to set the picture...well, variations, to however you want. When you're satisfied, hit ok. If you're not, click on the "original" and it'll reset:

Curves is another "tricky" filter of Photoshop. I don't really know how to explain this (although if you're really curious, there's tons of places on the web having detailed explanations for what this does.), other than it's just another way to enhance effects. Here (32kb) is the effect I used to get this:

Another one (popular) is called Hue/Saturation (Image>Adjustments>Hue/Saturation). Here (27kb) are the settings I used. A popular usage of this effect among icon makers are to use it to bump down the strength of colors in a picture. Example here:

(If the picture is too...grayed out and lifeless after you use the effect, you're pulling the saturation too low. To fix, either redo that step with less saturation, or go to Image>Adjust>Brightness/Contrast and bump both of those up slightly.)

Drumroll please. My favorite effect. Something I've also not seen in any icon tutorials. It is called High Pass (17kb) and it is wonderful. What you do is make a duplicate layer of your image, and then apply the filter to the duplicate layer (in Filters>Others>High Pass). Use the default (should be on 10). It looks kinda weird now, huh? Now go to Blending Options, and choose among the Overlay, Soft Light, Hard Light, etc section until you find one that looks good. This is very good for sharpening images and improving color without directly affecting that layer. It's also proven to be very good in the general sense as well. Works on nearly every picture when improving contrast/color/sharpness.

Well, there you have it. Extremely short, kinda useless, but hey. Hopefully this helped at least a few people.