tutorial #1 - keira knightly - see the sun

this would be my first tutorial. i made it using psp 8.0, but i didn't use anything drastic so i'm sure that it can be translated to other programs.
today we are going from this to
in very few steps i might add. let me know what you thought.


alrighty, first i did the obvious, cropped and resized my image to icon worthy proportions:


my second move was to desaturate the image. for us psp users that's bring the saturation down to 100:


third step was simple, all i did was duplicate the image and set it to screen


four i made a new raster layer and i filled it with this gradient [crumblingwalls]:

and got this after i set it to dodge:


personally, i think it looks pretty like that, but plain, and i was curious to see what would happen if i went on. i added this texture [anoldloveletter]:

set it to overlay and got this lovely image:


still plain..needs more. i went and added another texture [unknown, any clues?]:

i put it on multiply and set it at 50%


all you have to do now really is add your text, a nice border, and you're done.
i softened it up a little bit for kicks: