ppl on here say "you just put brushes on it..nothin special."

what can you do to make your design look better?

Use textures? Threshold some of your stock images? I'd just go crazy in Photoshop and find all kinds of effects to use.

whats stock images?

The images you use for your image, like an image you get off of Google would be a stock image I guess.

oh i see.

Since Photoshop has filters, layers, smudge, blur, pen tool, stamp, etc. you can use them to your advantage. There are so many filters that when you combine them, in different layers, you can get many many different looks. You can also blur/smudge/sharpen/etc. a layer, and on top of that, there are different layers modes you can put it on. It does make a difference!
Check out the tutorials for Photoshop if you want more of an idea of what to do besides brushes.
http://www.createblog.com/tutorials/index....oshop_tutorials

PS, stock images are just plain and simple images you can use to turn it into something different. There are some where you look at the before (stock) and after (finished), you might find the stock looking completely different or way enhanced.
http://www.istockphoto.com/index.php
http://www.sxc.hu/
^ the two stock sites I always use.

The thing that with Photoshop, the word "UNLIMITED" is the perfect word in this case.

Mess around with the filters, contrast, brightness, tools. You could even make something you would've never thought of.

Possibilities are ENDLESS. READ TUTORIALS! google is awesome.
You will learn so much from them. Learn the basics and move up from there. From there, you just need creativity, &there aren't any tutorials on that. ahha.

Yeah tutorials are always great. Or if you just look through some of the graphics on here, I'm sure you're bound to get ideas &/or inspiration. Or it also depends on your image, like the look it has & what you can do with it.

Like what everyone said, textures, mess around with filters and such.

But I think finding the right pictures is key (if you're using pictures).

The pen tool is cool but i also hate it at the same time. It never seems to do what i want it to do.

Though i would say add textures and stuff and play around with the colouring and stuff with the brushes