Okay, well, here's my second tutorial! I've been playing around with a lot of methods for my iconfiend100 challenge, and this is one that I've fallen in love with. Really simple and fun. :3

Okay, so we will be going from this to this: in 4 easy steps in PS 7. :3

Warning: This tutorial works best on brightish, dull color images. It makes dark images dark and light images...light. X3 Remember to be flexible with settings, you don't have to follow mine to a tee. :3

	Ok, so first we crop our base to our liking. I cropped Hihara and rotated the canvas. A little bit of Tsuchiura's shoulder was peeking through, so I took the Clone Tool and erased it. (If you do not know how to use the clone tool, for shame! >:O X3 It's super easy, simply select and hold hold the brush that appears over the part of the image you wish to 'copy', hold the ALT key and click, then hold it over the part of the image you want to past your copy and click again.)
	As you can see, I didn't sharpen my base. I duplicated my base, then sharped the duplicate, and set it to Soft Light. I prefer to set it to soft light on most of my sharpening of images, but that really depends on what you like to do/the image.
	Ok, now I add my favorite layer. My saturation layer. I take a red (#FF0000) and set it to Saturation. I lowered the Opacity to %16. The red tends to catch and radiate the natural colors, which is why I like to use it when I can.
	Last step. Merge your layers, duplicate (Ctrl J), then drag the copy to the top. Gaussian blur at about 2.0, and set to Overlay.
	And there you have it! I hope it helps. Remember, be flexible, and play around with it (see examples). I'd love to see anything you might make with this! Here are some other icons used with the same method. (The middle one had the Gaussianed layer set to lighten with %57 opacity, and then the Gaussian layer duplicated and set to linear light at %80)