I think you showed remarkable improvement and have a really lovely piece of work there.
I finally got together a sig that I can show the steps on so without further ado, the process.
I began by picking out the images I want to start with as my centerpiece and background. I chose the woman with long auburn hair, and a fractal image that compliemented the colors. I made ap ic that shows all the elements seperately in their unretouched state with the exception of the Stratics S cog which had been color adjusted to the right hues for this sig, more on that later. This is the collage:
I made a new file, sized about 150x700 to give me a little room to play.
To begin I placed my redhead and the fractal. I then took the marquee tool and selected a box of just her face(layer face) and some hair and made a copy that was topmost layer. I then took the first redhead layer and decreased opacity to about 50% so I could see what lay beneath and moved it til I was satisfied with placement. I then used the eraser at 20% to show up the vanilla colored stripes.
I then opened the S cog and used adjust color. hue, and saturation. This is incredibly valuable tool in making things match or contrast the way you want them to. Play with the sliders and watch it change til you see as something usable for you. I then placed it, again lowering trans to see exactly where it should fit best then took eraser and slowly took out the center til the fractal showed through. This is a snapshot of it at that point, you can see the transp differences between face and hair well:
I continued to removed the hair detail slowly using a 10%eraser and moved the layers a bit to better blend them smoothly. I added in the other two cogs with adjustment to the color values to look more coppery/chestnut tones. I had to juggle the size on them to get the teeth to "fit" properly, and it's still off but it looks ok. I also removed the inner cog color to show fractal behind it as well.
I add some detailing to the cogs using the outer glow in a sunset gradient overlay at 45% opac soft blend and added a outer bevel contour smoothed. You can copy and paste styles when you've tweaked a certain look you want to repeat, I often do so for consistant look in text. I play around with a few fonts and decide the Blackadder ITC looks best for it. I use a cantelope colored text and lay another gradient on it called peachy sky set on multiply and 75% opac. I do a drop shadow to make it a little crisper, and an outer glow again gradient called carribean sun which is much more red orange set to overlay. I set the text on "Bella" to gradient one way and reverse it on "Noire" and reduce the size for bdsm.
Now it's looking pretty but it's missing......something. I liked the effect of contrast of hair and hate covering it but it feels incomplete so I cruise through my stash of art. I found one that was a rl pic of a pretty gal with the right colored hair and facial structure wearing a silver wire filigree high collar, but the lighting on it is too blue and I give up trying to make it "fit" and look again til I find this gorgeous pic of a devilish angel that appeals to me for some reason /php-bin/shared/images/icons/smile.gif The blues and golds add a nice contrast and the hair shades down into the color scheme and I know we have a winner*grins* I add her in and move it around, trying to decide where it looks best and resize it to compromise how much I want to show vs the clarity of what can be seen. I erase some wing portions, and then use my smudge tool to blend the feathers a bit so the erased edges don't show and it flows into the other parts of the piece like connecting her hair to the originals in background. I add in my little Administratrix text and play with the size of it and try placing the text in different places til I am satisfied.
I finally feel like it is done, and ask a few friends for feedback(thanks Vio, Trillian, and Pluffy!). I save it for web and adjust the scale to permit me the best quality I can get under the 35k line, usually find it's about 65%.
I then write this big ass post and hope someone got something useful out of it, and show off my newest sig below. Hope you folks like it!
*bows*