Icon Tutorial Number One : Colors in Depth

I have people asking me for a tutorial. I ask people for tutorials. What is the deal with that? Anyways,  I found a tutorial a while ago I once liked and I changed it around quite a bit. Editing steps, adding steps, etc. There is no better iconist in my opinion than _impress_me , but that is my opinion. *waves to Zsazsa* But I want to become a budding artist. I have PS and PSP on my computer, and this tutorial is for PSP but is easily translatable into other programs such as Photoshop. Anyways, here is today's tutorial:

The original image:  transforming into:

The method I used for this is called indepth colors/vivid colors/curves, whatever. I'm not going to coy artists and their styles, cuz I'm not like that. So I'm gonna change some things around. Yay!

Step One: Crop image to 100 x 100 pixels and sharpen image. It should look like this:

The picture is of Doc Robbins from CSI and I found it at Erica's CSI Caps. Her site rocks. :p

Step Two: Here is where all the coloring begins. Since I'm using Jasc Paint Shop Pro 8, I believe, I'm going to go to Adjust > Automatic Contrast Audjustment. Then you should get a pop-up. Enter in the following information: Bias=Darker, Strength=Normal, Appearance=Bold. The pop-up should now look like this:

Click okay. :D You're icon now looks like this:

Step Three: Going back to Adjustments > Automatic Saturation Enhancement. A pop-up box appears and enter in this information: Bias=More colorful, Strength-Strong. Make sure you click the box that says Skintones present. Your window looks like this:

Click okay and your icon should look like this (or similar)

Here comes the last few steps. Go to Adjust > Brightness and Contrast > Curves. You'll get a window. At the top of that window is a drop-down box, click that and select Lighten. Click okay

and your icon will look like this:

Of course you can decorate your icon, but sometimes I don't like to. It ruins the icon. Here are some other samples I did with my tutorial:

Comments are always appreciated!!!!