One of my favorite Photoshop effects is the DRY BRUSH filter. By adding the effect to a photograph you can make it look more like a painting. You use a combination of brush size, brush detail and texture to get the look you want.
Hey, who put that picture of Natalie Portman on the Renaissance Center?
Actually, that was me! It's a cool effect in Photoshop. You can embed images on buildings or other surfaces. Pretty cool, eh? It's all done with vanishing point.
Here's another cool effect: 3-D Text.
The key element to to achieving this effect is converting text to shapes. That way the text can be enlarged and manipulated while maintaining its integrity.
This was fun! I used a photograph of the very lovely Jennifer Connelly to make this graphic, also in Photoshop.
It's a rather involved process using channels and luminosity and gradients. You have to play around with it a bit to get just the right effect.
This graphic was part of a school project in which we had to create a website and motif to promote an Olympic sport. Perhaps you saw my web design for the project on the design page.
I used a combination of Photoshop and Illustrator to make this graphic.
There are different ways to create textured text in Photoshop. I wanted to create some rough looking text. I did this using the displacement map feature. You can import and use different textures to come up with text like this.