severalplums | Winner's Tutorial, Challenge #96, by pensnest

This icon was made in PS CS5 on a Mac, but is absolutely translatable to any graphics program. Very quick and straightforward tutorial today!

This is the base.

I couldn't think of a way to enhance the colouring of the original photo as it looked pretty much perfect, so I decided to change it instead, and therefore applied a Gradient Map in Black/White.

Then I used a Levels adjustment layer, and pulled the LH end (black) very slightly right and the RH end (white) slightly left, to enhance the contrasts.

I was looking for something fairly simple, and after poking around my resources for a bit settled on some Stars textures from

thor_i_lover, and found one that filled the empty space in the icon as I wanted it to (set to Screen).

That didn't feel quite finished, so I had a look for something more, and ended up with this texture from

envious_forms, set to Soft Light, then Save for Web and Devices as .png24 (original). (The new twist with CS5 is that the SFWaD option defaults to saving an Optimised picture, which I generally don't want it to do as the resulting file is about half the size of saving the Original. Happily, 100x100 .pngs are small enough to work on LJ even if saved as 'original'.)

So the Layers palette is incredibly simple: