Muted Coloring [PS 7]

Going from this to this


Step One
Open the image you desire to use, for this tutorial I'll be using this one:

Step Two
Crop your image so the width and height dimensions are 100x100

Step Three
Duplicate your background layer and set the blend mode to screen.

Step Four
Duplicate layer again.

Step Five
Now we need a adjustment layer [Layer->New Adjustment Layer->Hue/Saturation], go down to the saturation area and put in -50

Step Six
Your Layers should look like the image below, if they do merge them [Layer->Merge Visible].

Step Seven
Time for Varations [Image->Adjustments->Varations]. Make sure midtones is selected, now you want to click more cyan twice, more blue once and lighter once. Select saturation now and click less saturation twice.

Step Eight
Your image should now look like this:

Step Nine
Make a new layer, fill it with #384257 and change the blending mode to exclusion.

Step Ten
Time for brushes!
not by me, can't remember who it was by but their credited somewhere on my resource post. ^_^;;
Now using the eyedropper tool pick any color you want, I chose a netural one kinda yellowish. Put the brush in that color and then your done

Additional Information
There are about a zillion ways to create this effect, this is only one way. The key is to expermient. Also when using this effect on icons very rarely will the effect look the same, which makes it even more interesting. To see what I mean take a look at the samples, all of them followed the tutorial yet each differ from each other.

NOTE: Steps three and four can be skipped, I only do them if the image is too dark.

Samples