Hey, this is my first Paint Shop Pro 9 Tutorial, so bear with me, please. Please feel free to ask questions if I don't explain something correctly. This tutorial should be easily transferable to Photoshop seeing as the only difference between the two programs is that Photoshop has a few more features.

1. We're starting with this image. It's important that you find an image of relatively high quality to work with. You can, in essence, improve the quality of any photo, but it's best to find one that you don't have to screw with too much.

2. I'm a stickler about cropping. All too often I see icons (and other photos) cropped so that the face is centered in the photo. THIS LOOKS TERRIBLE. Keep the neck, not the hair, when you crop. It's also best to shift the subject of your icon or banner off to the side. Make SURE that it's cropped/resized to 100x100 pixels. Otherwise, livejournal and greatestjournal won't let you use them! Here, just look what I've done.
 

3. The next step is to clean up the image quality (it's already done in the photo I just posted, sorry.) Go to the toolbar on the very top, select Adjust, then Automatic Contrast Enhancement. Set the Bias to Darker, the Strength to normal, and the Appearance to bold. I then used the Sharpen tool, which can be found on the Tools toolbar. If this isn't showing on the left of your PSP window, go back up to the top and go to View>>Toolbars, and make sure that the Tools one is highlighted. I sharpened the lightbulb with the sharpen tool.

4. Next, go to Layers>>Duplicate. With your new layer selected, go to Adjust>>Sharpness>>Sharpen. Then, go to Layers>>Properties. Set the Blend Mode to Soft Light. Then, with your new layer still selected, go to Adjust>>Hue and Saturation>>Hue/Saturation/Lightness. Type -100 into the box next to "Saturation." It should look like this:

5. Next, copy this light texture by colorfilter and paste it as a new layer (Edit>>Paste>>Paste as New Layer)

Set the blend mode to lighten. Your image should now look like this:

6. You can stop here if you like because I think this looks wicked bangin'. If you wish to continue, however, there is one more cool effect you can use. Go to Image>>Add Borders. Put "25" in all the boxes (make sure the Symmetric box is checked) and set the color to white (#ffffff). Click "OK." Then, go to Image>>Add Borders AGAIN, but this time, put "2" in each of the boxes, and set the color to a light grey (I used #cccccc). Click "OK." Then, go to Image>>Resize. Put "100" in both the width and height boxes, and make sure that it's set to "pixels" in the drop-down menu to the right. Make sure, at the bottom of the window, that it says "Resample using: Smart Size." Make sure this box is checked as well. Leave all other settings as they are, and click "OK."

7. Adjust>>Sharpness>>Sharpen.

8. The image itself is now done! Hooray! SAVE IT AS EITHER .JPG OR .PNG!!! Everything else either looks like hell or won't upload. .png is higher quality than .jpg, but it also takes up more hard drive space. I recommend that you always save things as .png, just because you can upload them to, say, www.photobucket.com, and then you can delete them from your hard drive. Anyway, your image should look like this:

Have fun with Paint Shop and/or Photoshop! Don't be afraid to deviate from this tutorial... try new things! And please, COMMENT WITH QUESTIONS. I'll do my best to answer.