Skin Colourization

Hello. It's my first time posting here and I just have a question about colourising icons. Or two, actually.

I use Photoshop 5 and 7.

I don't know how to colourize icons while still maintaining that natural brownish/peachy skin colour. Here are some examples of the effect I want to get:

1. 2. 3. 4.

First two are made by fly_meaway.
Last two are made by codestothestars.

Can anybody recreate the general steps that they did to produce those icons? The skin tone is still sort of yellowish-reddish but it doesn't look like the default picture either. I can't seem to do that effect without my icon turning too orange or looking like the default picture or looking somewhat unsaturated (example). I've tried several things: selective colour adjustments, replace colour, and copying the image, desaturating it and setting it to soft light. They all work sort of fine but the problem is that the colour looks too uniform and not natural at all.

I have another question although you don't have to answer this one if you don't feel like it since I' mostly concerned about my first question.


Made by codestothestars.

It looks like they used a texture over the image (I don't know if they set it to soft light, linear burn, or multiply though) but I can't duplicate that effect effectively. Whenever I try to make an icon dark on purpose, it just ends up looking too dark or too much like the texture I used. Does anybody have any suggestions on what I should do? Like how light should the starting image be, how light should the texture be, what blending mode should I set the texture layer to, etc.

I'm not a total beginner to PS so just general tips should be fine. =) Thank you in advance.