Damien Symonds

If you google "Wacom circle around cursor" you'll find plenty of hits.

Either it's black-and-white, or it's not. This is not. Please show me a screenshot of your layers panel.

The short answer is "no". You can exaggerate backlight, but it's damned hard to created it out of a front- or side-lit photo.

Now you need a thin but distinct bit of shadowing around the edge of the ground itself. So it looks a bit indented.

Standard.

I'd probably lower the Lightness slider on a Hue/Sat layer, and paint that on.

Yeah, the bottom (waist) part needs to be a bit darker with shadow, yes?

Good grief, you don't use Curves for that, and you definitely don't use the black eyedropper. http://www.damiensymonds.net/2013/02/using-photo-filter-layer-to-fix-casts.htm

What are you trying to fix?

I really don't know. But I bet the Pen Tool was heavily involved, either in Photoshop or in Illustrator.

If you can just tidy up the masking where the chain enters the top tag, I'd say it's fine!

Yep, correct.

Here's a PSD showing one step of the many steps involved in this.

In more ways than you know. http://www.damiensymonds.net/bridge-30-day-challenge

For the area, I don't have any magic tricks for you, sorry. You'll just need to copy one stripe at a time from further down his chest, move and rotate it into position, then mask it in, and lighten it as needed. It'll be very painstaking.

Oh Alrons, please don't wait any longer to take The Raw Class. Your SOOR is nowhere near as good as it should be. Monitor calibration is no longer a requirement, if that's what was holding you back.

Oh wow, well done!

This was a darn difficult one. How did you go?

Have you done this to be sure? http://www.damiensymonds.net/art_tscs000.html

Yes. And the Raw one too.

Clipping means "linking" layers, in a way. If you clip a layer to another layer below it, the top layer will only be visible where the bottom layer is also visible. Where the bottom layer is transparent, none of the top layer will show either. Clipping is done (for you on Photoshop on a PC) by pressing Ctrl Alt G.

You can see the little plus sign, yes? It's very important to watch where that is.

Download the PSD file As usual, done with this method.

This one sure was tricky. How does this look?

Ok, so where did you Option-click?