Beginners Tutorial
An icon tutorial designed for beginners.
Going from this
to this 
Going from this
A lot of people I've talked to have wondered how to make icons lighter and more interesting looking. This tutorial will show you how to lighten icons, as well as using layers to change the coloring and adding textures to make it more visually pleasing :)
To start off, we're going to take this pic of the lovely Joe Jonas. As you can see, it's rather dark.
To make it lighter, we're going to duplicate the base 3 times. You should have four identical layers now. Take the top 3 layers and set them all to screen, opacity 100. Setting them all to screen makes the image a lot lighter.
There, that looks a lot better, doesn't it? I also went and sharpened the image, so it looked a little clearer. Each picture needs to be sharpened a different amount; it varies picture to picture. For this one, I sharpened it 50 %.
Now we're going to play with the coloring a little bit. Create a new layer and flood it with #dafaac. Or you can just take the picture below and paste it over your pic.
Set that layer to soft light opacity 30. That gives Joe a slight yellow-green glow.
Now, fill another layer with the color #233f84. It's a dark navy blue.
Set that layer to exclusion opacity 40. That gives the picture a nice navy glow around it, and makes the yellow-green layer from before pop out just a tad bit more.
Now, we can leave Joe like that, but I think that looks a bit boring, so we're going to add this texture over him, made by colorfilter.
Paste that directly over your image and set that layer to screen, at 100. That way, we can still see Joe but the sparkles still show up on the right of the icon.
Now, you can add text or brushes to spice up the image even further. I added his name and used the Free Rotate Layer tool to move the text on an angle and I placed it directly over his shoulder.
And that's all there is to it! This tutorial is very adaptable; you can use the same techniques on any other icons, but be sure to play around with the different colors and settings to get the effect you want. Some icons may not work well with the navy exclusion layer, and others may look great. It all depends on the particular image.
Other icons made using this technique:
[Unknown LJ tag]
To start off, we're going to take this pic of the lovely Joe Jonas. As you can see, it's rather dark.
To make it lighter, we're going to duplicate the base 3 times. You should have four identical layers now. Take the top 3 layers and set them all to screen, opacity 100. Setting them all to screen makes the image a lot lighter.
There, that looks a lot better, doesn't it? I also went and sharpened the image, so it looked a little clearer. Each picture needs to be sharpened a different amount; it varies picture to picture. For this one, I sharpened it 50 %.
Now we're going to play with the coloring a little bit. Create a new layer and flood it with #dafaac. Or you can just take the picture below and paste it over your pic.
Set that layer to soft light opacity 30. That gives Joe a slight yellow-green glow.
Now, fill another layer with the color #233f84. It's a dark navy blue.
Set that layer to exclusion opacity 40. That gives the picture a nice navy glow around it, and makes the yellow-green layer from before pop out just a tad bit more.
Now, we can leave Joe like that, but I think that looks a bit boring, so we're going to add this texture over him, made by colorfilter.
Paste that directly over your image and set that layer to screen, at 100. That way, we can still see Joe but the sparkles still show up on the right of the icon.
Now, you can add text or brushes to spice up the image even further. I added his name and used the Free Rotate Layer tool to move the text on an angle and I placed it directly over his shoulder.
And that's all there is to it! This tutorial is very adaptable; you can use the same techniques on any other icons, but be sure to play around with the different colors and settings to get the effect you want. Some icons may not work well with the navy exclusion layer, and others may look great. It all depends on the particular image.
Other icons made using this technique:
[Unknown LJ tag]