to

Photoshop CS4
Easy
7 steps

1. Open your base, crop to 100 x 10 pixels.

2. Duplicate your base and set to Soft Light 100% Opacity.
This gives the image must more contrast, as well as making the colors in the image much more vivid and bright. Soft Light layers work really well when colors in an image need brightening up.

3. Create a Fill Layer and fill with #ece3b3. Set this to Soft Light 80% Opacity.
This brightens the image up, as well as giving the skin a more yellow natural tone. This color also helps bring out the blue and the reds in the image.

4. Create another Fill Layer and flood with #e8afbb, set to Color Burn 100% Opacity.
Using this color and the Color Burn means the reds in the image are made really prominent. It also again adds more contrast to the image, as well as darkening some areas of the image a little more.

5. Another Fill Layer, #8fb6c3 and set to Color Burn 10% Opacity.
This reds some of the red added in the previous step that made the skin look unnatural. It also darkens the black in the image.

6. Layer > New Adjustment Layer > Brightness/Contrast
BRIGHTNESS  -7
CONTRAST  7
This adds a little more depth to the image. Also sometimes the Soft light layer can make the image to shinny so this layer should help reduce this.

7. Create another Fill Layer and flood with #fbf6b1 and set to Lighten 19% Opacity.
This adds back some of the natural skins tones to the image, as well as brighten the image with a yellow tone.

8. SHIFT + CTRL + ALT +E, Next Sharpen your image, i sharpened mine twice. Next take a Large Soft brush in #ffffff and set to Soft Light, stamp this in the top left of the icon.

That's it. This coloring will not work for every image you try it on, so play around with the settings to fit your image. This is just an example of some types of coloring you can achieve using Photoshop, so use this as a guide rather than a step by step coloring.

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