general photoshop

well i will start this tutorial as a very broad tutorial mainly for beginners, but also for people who simple wanna extend there "photoshop" and art knowledge.

Well people might say "PhotoShop is great(well it is), i do a couple of clicks and I'm an artist", well isn't it the same with a brush? you take a bit of paint, make some lines and you are an artist. Never forget that photoshop isn't a way of doing art (although it has become a status symbol these days), but merely a tool. It is nice just starting to design around, and play with photoshop and then getting to a nice end result, but you will find out, that before you make a really good piece, there is and should be quite some amount of thinking and research.

Some basic art knowledge is always good, rules of compositions, semiotic knowledge and others.
Before i go into too much detail, lets start of with a few basic things, which are currently quite trendy.

grunge, weird effects and more - theme: phyic therapy

lets start of with some photo (preferable try to create some sort of archive, with all photos you have taken, and photos you have found somewhere, makes life much easier). Always try to have an idea, or at least a theme/topic before you start, makes life easier as well, art should express something.
Here I took a picture of my sister, stretched her eye browes, nose, smoothed her face, turned her mouth around, and messed around a bit. Also added a bit of a motion blur effect on top of her.

I blacked out the left side, as i wanted to make a contrast/unbalanced picture.
Added some minor grunge behind the photo, and added a faded out skull
above my sisters head.

Lets add some more contrast. Inverted picture on theleft.with some line dodge.
TIP: try diffrent images, and apply the color/line dodge blend mode.
It often gives very nice effects

Add words, and stuff which give meaning to the picture, dont slap them into the
viewers face, but just add them, so they are no real focus points.

Some scanlines, with the color dodge blend, really does wor here.
It adds certain hotspots, and makes the picture brighter, more interersting.

Another thing you can do to spice up your image, is to put it into context.
Here for the tut, I've just done a quick 3d scene, and grunged the entire thing.
This more or less combines modern with grunge, which makes the contrast even stronger.