George, thank you for your feedback and your lighting suggestions. As I am constantly learning in Photoshop, there are 60 different ways to arrive at the same place. I used a combination of selections(isolating parts of a photo and placing them onto their own layer), Blending Options, Layer masks, some dodging and burning, tonal contrasting, and sharpening.

Go back to page one and read about the 'caca' 'art phase' in 1914 in France. That picture, 'the turd' is 'a propos' and not taken seriously by anyone.

One the rest? I cannot fins ANY place in the US that does not have its local cooperative art gallery or local museum so, you are wrong there. Art is not where the 'artist and investors' claim to be but in those small places where the art is alive and reflects local life or location.

Just open your eyes and be amazed on how creative local painters and sculptors can be (as well as fine art photography). They just don't use their asses as their mouth unlike what we see in 'trendy galleries'.

My apologies for the severe criticism of your opinion but I am letting off steam because someone did rub the wrong way.

http://www.uglyhedgehog.com/t-12164-1.html#142973

It never ceases to amaze me how people spend $800 to $2,000 for a moderately-professional camera body, add multiple hundreds or thousands of dollars worth of lenses for a total investment of maybe $3,000 to $5,000, then moan and whine about buying THE top notch super powerful editing software to match it.

Is it that a tangible in-hand property made of plastic and metal and glass that you can touch and fondle and polish with a soft towel seems to be worth the absorbent price you paid for it, while software hiding on a hard drive seems like an intangible property worth next to nothing because it doesn't weigh a pound, you can't fondle it, nor create an original photographic file from what you see and want to capture?

Is PhotoShop more than most amateurs need? Yes. Is the learning curve steeper than most amateurs want to endure? Yes. Can lesser software packages do most of what amateurs want to do? Yes. Can freebie software from Korea handle what amateurs want? Probably.

But what does this say about what has happened to our society and photographers in general? Get it free, put out less effort, learn the least that you have to, find something that does the minimum required, maybe it can do it automatically so I don't have to learn anything at all...

This mindset extends into Guitar Hero instead of a real guitar because playing metal strings and finding the right frets is hard. You can push plastic buttons on Garage Band and think you're as good as Eddie Van Halen so why put out the effort to actually learn to play for real?

This mindset extends into MP3 file ripping and free distribution. It doesn't matter that the artist who wrote the songs and their record company spent $500,000 recording, advertising, and distributing the CD worldwide so the artist can make money from his/her product - the motto is now "screw them, I'm going to get it for free and listen to it until I'm sick of it without paying a dime plus give it to all my friends free too."

And into DVD movie ripping but that's even worse with multi-millions of dollars lost per movie.

All the time there are posters on UH who are whining about how many features their cameras have. "Why can't I just buy a simple camera?" is the question on the surface. The answer is that they can - an 18MP P&S for $139. But the real question hidden behind the asked question is "Why can't I spend more and get a camera that will do everything for me to accomplish an awesome professional output like I see in magazines and on TV without me having to do anything but push the shutter button?"

For that matter, what has happened to the logic of a college-level teacher who makes at least $25 an hour and probably more like $50 an hour teaching PhotoShop but is readily telling people about free GIMP which makes them not take the course on PhotoShop? Then says the class attendance is down. Duh... Doesn't this teacher realize that when someone gets something free that they aren't going to pay for training to use it? The value of the free product is zero so there is no intense desire to spend more than zero to learn how to use it! The student is addicted to free. If they're too cheap to buy full-blown Student PhotoShop CS5 for $165 to take a class (and they'd pay big bucks for the books to take any other class) they certainly will avoid paying for the class as well. This is just illogically talking yourself out of a job. Will the school pay her to teach a free software that anybody in the general public can download? I doubt it. I really doubt it.

I buy my MP3s from Amazon. I have played real musical instruments for 45 years and wouldn't have Guitar Hero in my house if it was given to me free (which is likely because it's discontinued now that the fad is over). I buy DVDs and Blu-Rays when I want them for myself and rent them from down the street when I don't. I pay to have what I want and I overpay if necessary for the best - not the cheapest crap or clone.

I tried GIMP and thought it was laid out badly and sucked. It had a learning curve just like anything else and I didn't want to waste my time learning something I didn't like and would have to endure. I bought, upgraded several times, and used PaintShop Pro for many years and I know for a fact that PhotoShop CS5 blows it away - although PaintShop Pro is a decent package. PhotoShop CS5 is the pinnacle of photo editing and that's where I'm staying.