Winner's Tutorial, Challenge #89, by pensnest

[pensnest]

This is where I rejoice that I keep notes on the Layers palette, as it has been a while... Icon was made in PS CS3 on a Mac, and uses Curves and Color Balance.



Here's the crop:



First, I did a Curves layer to darken the image and increase the contrast:



It's a rather shallow S-shape, particularly in the darkening part, but it does sharpen things up a bit.

Then I fiddled with Color Balance a bit to increase the Blue of the highlights, without doing anything to the Shadows or Midtones.



I then did an amalgamated layer of everything so far, and used the lasso tool to select the butterfly, quite roughly—I wasn't worried about having too much of the background. Put this on a new layer, then applied a Gaussian Blur filter at 4.7 to the amalgamated layer.



I masked off the area around the butterfly to hide how haphazardly I'd selected it, and set it to Hard Light, then duplicated this layer twice to increase the intensity and contrast of the orange butterfly against the background. For reasons I don't now remember I then disabled the Layer Mask on the lowest of the three layers. Also masked off some of the blurred layer so that a few of the flowers are suitably spiky. Saved for Web and Devices as png24.



Here's the layers palette: