bats in the belfry. nice entry

nice colours and good use of source.

congrats on your entry.. may I give you a couple of tips. if you look at your cut out, especially the arm on the left of screen ( and other parts) it has a very "zig-zag" finish. to help fix that :

get a small brush .. round - hardness 0. size small ( will vary on the size of your image but start small.. eg 10-25

go to the image layer , click on it.. add layer mask. ( use mask not eraser.. easy to fix image issues).. now using soft brush on mask.colour black to take away , white to bring it back, go around the edges of your image and "smooth" them out

hope this helps.

Goodluck

a little rough author, but wonderful to see the imagination... fun chop and the polish will come, you will find yourself correcting things you never noticed before.. you'll get the hang of it, and this is a great start.. GOOD LUCK

Good advice from scratzilla1 and Drivenslush. The sources used are at a good res and will be sharper if you create your entry at a larger size and at a higher resolution. I usually work at 200pxl per inch, see this entry for an example: http://www.pxleyes.com/photoshop-picture/56fecc534026b/Sunday-in-the-Park.html

The PSD (working size) is appx. 11.656" X 9.56" at 200 pxls per inch. The JPEG used for submission is appx. 11.656" X 9.56" at 125 pxls per inch giving me a final image at 4.98M which is just under the maximum size allowed for submission images. This makes the high res version of the entry 20.236" X 16.597" at 72 pxls per inch.

It's just a matter of reducing the resolution when making the final JPEG. I keep the res at 100 pxls per inch as the minimum size and if needed I reduce the image dimensions until the final size is at 5.00M or just under that size. It's simple trial and error and takes a little time but the result is a good sharp entry image and a good high res version.

Thanx to all of you for the comments and tips. I have been using (and teaching) Photoshop since version 3. I just got lazy and uploaded the princess too quick. I fixed a few things this morning like her arm, the pixelized edges, and her skinny waist. I kept it at 72dpi since on screen the resolution won't make much difference.

It was fun!

So this should be the last version. Her head is more in proportion, and I added a golden background by copying a tiny piece of the golden metal in the source image.