After posting in another thread about my "sword in the stone" wallpaper image, I thought I'd share how it went together. Here's the image again (clickable for the wallpaper-sized image), and the attachments are the images I started with:
The image is actually pretty heavily layered. I added a radial gradient that enhanced the color, putting an aqua tone in the lower left and a green tone in the upper right, but leaving the golden colors alone in the beams in the middle. There's a subtle dust layer following the sunbeam angles, and a glow around the glare on the rock and sword. Manually added some starbursts on the hilt. The rock's color balance is heavily tweaked (using three different tools) to make the grass color and illumination fit the theme a little better and take the blues out of the rock.