MAI: Icon tutorial.
Program: Adobe Photoshop CS5
Translatable: No, uses selective coloring, but could be opted out.
Steps: 7-8
Dificullty: Easy/medium
Other: This is my first tutorial I’ve ever done so if there is any confused, let me know and I can help!
 to 
The usual, crop your base to the size you like. I cropped mine 100x100 pixels. This is my own screen capture.

Duplicate your base and set it to screen, 100%. This will depend on the darkness of our image but for mine, I wanted to brighten everything up. It may look a little bright now, but it will help your colour over-all in the end. Without it, the image would be too dark.

Now, make a new Colour Balance layer (layer>new adjustment layer>colour balance). We’re going to edit up the midtones to take some of the yellow out of the image. Again, this will depend on your image so feel free to play around a bit! My icon at this point had a good amount of yellow.
Midtones: -57, -36, +86
See! It's now less blurred together and the red in her blade and sleeve now actually look red instead of orange!

Next, we add a Curves layer (layer>new adjustment layer>curves). The icon right now is looking a little washed out so this layer will brighten up the colours we brought out with the midtones.;
RGB; Input: 164, Output: 142
Input: 77, Output: 59
RED; Input: 130, Output: 109
GREEN; Input: 145, Output: 111
BLUE; Input: 135, Output: 118
Now the icon is more vibrant and eye-catching. Once again, the red is starting to stand out and all the colours are getting their own attention!

Duplicate your base and drag it to the top. Set it to lighten, 100% or to your images benefit. For Mai, it lightens the shadows without affecting the colours too much and takes away some of that blurry blending into the shadows. You can see it in the shiny part of her hair.

The cable and volcano behind her are now less blended together and look a lot better. It tones down the purples that we created in the curves and midtones layers.
Now for the selective colouring (layer>new adjustment layer>selective colour). The purpose of this layer is the bring out the red in Mai’s blade or any red you might have in your image that was dulled with step six. This step will also control the blues so please, experiment with your image!
REDS: 0, +10, +6, +14
YELLOWS: 0, -100, +23, -100
Now, Mai's blade is the right colour. It's hard to tell on this image, but on the first one in the examples, this step added some blue to the skin. We will fix that with the next optional step.

(Optional) For the last step, all I’m going to do is make a colour fill layer, set on colour burn, of #fdf4da. I used this colour to bring a more peachy colour to Mai’s skin tone rather than her being so white. This could be completely optional depending on your image.

This step fixes the blue skin problem we had in the previous step. Now Mai's skin is more natural and less white.
Other results of this tutorial:
