Tutorial: How to enhance images for Avatar and Sig purposes

Excellent tutorial! That Smart Blur trick is awesome, I'll definitely use that next time I make an avatar. I've always wondered how people manage to get rid of those artifacts.

The only thing I would change is instead of using the brightness/contrast sliders, I'd always use Levels (Image tab>Adjustements>Levels). The main advantage of doing that is that you get a nice visual representation of your image such as the one up there, and it's much more controllable. It also gives you a nice "shortcut" if you don't want to manually tweak any settings.

Using your cropped Speedy image, here's the Levels screen:



Now you can do two things:

Simply use the "white" and "black" color picker... things:


The image will automatically adjust those levels to white and black. This is usually just fine, as you can see here. But sometimes your image might not have white or black, or for any other reason you want to do it manually. In that case you can adjust the sliders:



And you can even adjust each color's levels by going under the RGB tab and choosing red/green/blue. I've never really used that though, so I don't know how that works out.

I also usually use Overlay instead of Soft light on that final step, but I don't really know what the difference is, it looks like it results in pretty much the same effect.

Jam it back in, in the dark.