Create bevelled text
I might be superfluous in my method here, but it works well for me 
Add some text
Added blending-modes:
Final result
Making ‘Fairy Tales’
This time round, I tried to take more screenshots
Getting the different pieces:
I had this from a trip to the Etosha National Park earlier this year:
Plus some stock-photography:
Masking and positioning
There are different ways you can get this step done. You could use the pen-tool too for example. I just chose to brush out parts I didn't need.
Preparing the background
Converted the image to black & white:
Added some clouds - just because I can
And came up with this...
Putting it together
This was the hardest step really. I try to re-draw light in the image and try to draw the attention of the viewer to certain areas of the picture
The mask resulted in some hard-edges, so I gaussian blurred it a little
Added noise:
And gave it a cyan-tint
Some magic
I used a couple of brushes to make this
The final image
And a little bit of tweaking later...
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 Performance
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