Create bevelled text
I might be superfluous in my method here, but it works well for me 
Add some text
Surrealism “Propaganda”
I had this idea for a couple of days and finally decided to do it yesterday. This was the process (very very roughly)
Step 1: Getting the initial photos
This is the embarassing part. You'll look silly almost no matter what - trying to get a self-portrait in a suitable position that you envision. A camera on tripod, remote control and bounce-flash later though (thanks, I like my bedsheets too):
Got some stock-photography from Pierre on DeviantArt
Step 2: Putting the 2 together
I had to give the photo a bit more room at the top, so I photoshopped some more wall there. With composites, sometimes I'll mask out the individual parts as precisely as I can initially and save the respective masks in my channels. In this case, I put them together first and then masked it all together. I think that's a mistake and I should have masked the subject first (me) then masked the television. Could have saved myself quite a bit of time afterwards.
Step 3: Magic
OK, so I skipped a lot of steps - my bad - I didn't take any screenshots. I was too busy wondering "how the hell am I going to get this to blend". I guess there's always a point in these highly-processed photos where I say "I should stop right now, this is just not working", but I keep on going because it's taken so much effort already. Eventually, there's a point where I say "oh, I might have something here". I suppose that makes it all the more rewarding in the end.
I use a lot of different filters and textures and try to burn-and-dodge a lot.
Step 4: Colouring and painting light
I hate masking and I love "painting-light" and manipulating it. I think that if I actually loved masking, I could have some really amazing work.
At this point, I also did a bit of liquifying and stretched/distorted parts of the photo.
Almost 3 hours later, this was the final shot:
Photo Retouching – Before and After
Below is a before-and-after comparison of a photo I've been working on retouching:
Took me almost an hour and a half to do, but it was completely worth it in the end.
Will post the photo to Flickr later on today.
UPDATE:
Improving Photoshop CS4/CS5 Performance
Note: This was initially written for Photoshop CS4, but from what I've seen, it also applies to Photoshop CS5.
If you're having performance issues after installing Adobe's latest version of Photoshop, try having a look at these options:
Allocating more memory to Photoshop
- Edit -> Preferences -> Performance to allocate more RAM to Photoshop.
- Don't use too much (over 90% for example), your OS will need RAM too!
- Don't allocate too little.
- Experiment, try 60% and work your way up or down.
Set up a scratch disk
- This is similar to virtual memory.
- Photoshop needs at least 2GB, but more is recommended.
- It's recommended that you set the primary scratch disk to a different hard-disk than the one Windows uses for its virtual memory or paging file.
- To set up your scratch disk options (requires Photoshop-restart): Edit -> Preferences -> Performance
Set up your cache-levels
- Used to redraw high-resolution images faster.
- The levels range from 1-8 (default: 4), the more levels, the more image-caches Photoshop keeps and the slower images load.
- Setting the cache option to 1 disables image caching.
- Setting the cache option to higher than 4 improves performance when working on large images (by redrawing faster).
- If you use many levels (50+), set the cache option lower: 1 or 2
- If you deal with large-dimension images, use a cache option larger than 4
- To set up cache levels (requires Photoshop-restart): Edit -> Preferences -> Performance
Purge Undo, Clipboard, or Histories
- This clears up memory
- Edit -> Purge
Reduce the number of History states
- By reducing the number of history states, you decrease the amount of memory used by Photoshop.
- To set the number of history states: Edit -> Preferences -> Performance
Saving PSD files with the compatibility feature
- This increases the size of the PSD file by saving a flattened version of the image too.
- If you don't need the compatibility, save without it.
- To set up options: Edit -> Preferences -> File Handling
GPU use
- CS4 makes use of your graphics card's GPU, instead of the computer CPU to speed its screen redraw.
- The display card must support OpenGL (with at least 128MB RAM).
- The display driver must support OpenGL 2.0 and Shader Model 3.0.
- Make sure you have the latest drivers for your GPU to improve performance.
Disabling OpenGL
- If you experience really poor performance, you might want to try experimenting with turning OpenGL off all-together.
- Edit -> Preferences -> Performance -> Untick OpenGL
Minimize palette preview thumbnails
- Each layer has a preview-thumbnail, minimize the size of these to save memory
- To minimize (or turn off) palette thumbnails, select Palette Options from the palette menu.
- For Thumbnail Size, select the smallest thumbnail size or select None, then click OK.
Bigger Tiles plug-in
- Disabled by default.
- Located in the Optional Plug-ins folder on your application DVD folder.
- Enable only if you have more than 1GB RAM.
- Copy to your extensions folder to enable.
- When enabled, Photoshop redraws more data at a time because each tile is larger, and each tile is drawn, complete, at one time.
- That is, Photoshop takes less time to redraw fewer tiles that are larger than it takes to redraw more tiles that are smaller.
- If you spend most of your time painting or rapidly tweaking controls in filters or panels and watching the feedback, then Bigger Tiles won't help you.
- If you spend your time watching progress bars, Bigger Tiles can improve performance.
Photoshop: The split-toning effect
You might have seen this effect:
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It has become pretty easy to do in something like Adobe Lightroom. But - if you're interested in the manual process, here's one way of doing it:
- Convert an image to B&W using your preferred method (desaturate or channel-mixer or other)
- Duplicate layer (CTRL-J), use smart-sharpening filter (optional)
- Flatten (SHIFT-CTRL-E)
- Add a Colour Balance layer adjustment, select SHADOWS -> Move the yellow-blue sllider to the right. Move the cyan-red slider to the left.
- Add another colour balance layer adjustment, select HIGHLIGHTS -> Move the cyan-red slider to the right this time. Move the yellow-blue slider to the left.
- Select the blending options for the current layer-adjustment. In the blend-if section, select 'blue' from the drop-down
- Move the left slider first to about 60, then press ALT and drag it to about 200 till you have the effect you want.
- Flatten image
- You can reduce the saturation on it at this stage and you can also use the burn tool to emphasize shadows