How to dull the colors of an image

Every designer sooner or later comes across an image to make graphics with, but he renounces because the image's fluorescent-bright colors hurt the eyes. This tutorials aims to give a solution to that "problem"; all you need is a obscenely bright image and Adobe Photoshop. For this tutorial I'll be using an icon 100x100, but it works with every kind of image.

Open your image in Photoshop, and go to File --> New and open a new file with the same width and height as your image; from the Color Mode menu, select the Grayscale option and click Create. See image down her for reference.

Select the Move tool from the Tools menu; then, go to your image, drag it to new file and move it until it's completely aligned. You should now have a black and white image like this.

Now got to File --> New and open another document, making sure of changing the Color Mode from Greyscale to RGB Color as shown in the image.

Drag the b&w image to the new file, then go to your original image and drag that over to the third file like shown in the image (mines are not aligned for showing purpose, but you have to align them).

Right-click on the image and select the first option, Blending Options, to open the Layer Style tab; once there go where you see Advanced Blending (see image below for reference).

Select the value you prefer based on how much you want to tone down the colors - personally, I've found values between 40 (for the brightest images) and 75-80 (for those less bright) are the best - as shown and image, and click OK to apply the changes

Now go to Layer --> Merge Visible and merge the layers...and there you go; your eyes-hurting image has been toned down to a more bearable level and can be used to make graphics, designs or whatever you want. Enjoy! ^.^