Playing with Photoshop

I have seen some beautiful work lately that has inspired me to play with Photoshop again. I have PS Elements 7, it works fine on my older computer. I did just simple stuff, I took some of my "texture" photos, flames, pampas grass, and a glass ball that looks like flowers, and colorized them a bit with hue and saturation. Then I cropped a bird on branch picture and laid it over. The next step is to choose the "Layer effect" I can't even remember which I used, I played with the different settings, until I found one I liked. Then I cropped again to take just the best part of the picture, and flattened the image, so I could save it as a JPEG. I could have done some finesse, like adding more contrast to the bird and sky to get a sharper image, or coloring the bird first, or making the sky transparent. I'll play more when I have time. Photoshop is so diverse, it takes a long time to learn all the thousands of things you can do with it. This was just a quickie effort.

Maybe I'll print one of them on fabric and add some shiny rayon thread painting. :)