using textures, channel mixer and adjustment layers.
made in CS, in five steps.
one. crop your image. this tutorial works best with clean images with a lot of light in them. this one was found here.
two. go into image>adjustments>channel mixer. follow these settings:
red output:
red: +114
green: +56
blue: -48
green output:
red: +8
green: +100
blue: 0
blue output:
red: +2
green: 0
blue: +102
three. now go to layers>new adjustment layer> brightness/contrast... and follow these settings:
brightness: +9
contrast: +15
this will only change the image a little bit, but it helps brighten it up. if you image is bright anyway, you can alter this step, or skip it entirely.
+
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four. now i added a texture over the image. i used this lovely one by
gothic_mischief, rotated it 90CCW, and set it to soft light. if this texture looks odd for your image, try choosing one that had warmer or cooler colors, depending on the palette you're working with. this image has a lot of blues and yellows in it, so this one was perfect for me. 
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five. this step is just to spice up the icon a little. take a soft 100px brush and stamp it twice over a part of the icon. try to place it near the point of focus in the image, but not directly on top of it. you can use any color you want, but i used FF0267, as it's a bit of a colder color than the ones used before, and it makes for a nice contrast. once you've got that much done, set the layer to screen and lower the opacity to 50%.
and now you're done! thanks for reading! comments are very much loved. ♥
other examples (using other color combinations):
