Uvah, there are many ways to color brushes but I will try to give you a quick fix. Create a new layer underneath the layer the brush is on. On the layer the brush is on,control click the layer thumbnail to select all pixels, make the layer underneath it the active layer, choose your bown color and click over the tree in the image with the paint bucket tool once or twice to fill the tree with the brown. Or control click the layer thumbnail of the brush to select, add layer mask and paint the tree.

Your ground cover is way to bright and colorful.

http://www.obsidiandawn.com/removing-transparency-with-brushes-photoshop-tutorial

http://www.obsidiandawn.com/using-multiple-colors-with-photoshop-brushes-tutorial

Thats kinda cute for a lite halloween image...my advice is to add some squiggly trails coming off the house.Make it more see thru and blur some of the harsher edges.The distortion effect is actually effective tho maybe a bit too strong...it does have a sort of Tim Burton feel to the house.The idea of a house not only being haunted but also being the ghost is a cute idea.

Add some glows to ghost and house maybe?(can never go wrong with blue tinted glows haha)(maybe orange yellow glows around the windows and door)

The biggest problem is the background...its too real for the subject in my opinion.

I would seperate the trees from the sky and cartoon them up to match the rest of the subjects.

The entire image is compositionally awkward...the house is dead center and using up too much room...increase the size of the background and move thing around a little...give it some breathing room.

And...what?...no full moon in a ghost picture? hehe

Thank you very much Frankief. I got both links bookmarked for easy reference. The ground cover I was only playing with. Don't know it I want to keep it or not. How about de-saturating it then applying hue/saturation to give it a hint of color?

Perhaps like this. I created the new layer under the brush layer and made it the active layer. Then took the dark brown on the swatches and made it darker. On the brush layer I reduced the opacity to 91% to show just a hint of the dark brown through the black. Looks good to me against the background. I then de-saturated the ground cover and used hue/saturation to give that just a hint of green but made it darker. Seems to work.

Now you have a brown halo on the tree. The tutorial will tell you how to avoid this. Another thought would be to use a nice cloud brush behind your tree to give it definition. Clouds look more realistic if you do two or three layers and invert the bottom layer. At this time of year the ground cover should really be more brownish than green. You also will need some adjustments along the tree bottoms on the right.

Frankie I like the mist you added on the bottom. I think it's ready to go. I don't look at where will my icons go or how they'll look because that's what they made Fences for. I would definitely wear this as a wall or as a great Halloween LogOn. I know that you have windows live, maybe post it to your sky drive, that is if you need a place, to avoid registering at media fire. I look forward to seeing this on the boards. I find your brushwork here captivating.   

Have made some changes per some suggestions via PM. Better or not?

DEFINITELY Better!

Uvah...I'm gonna be straight with you...I dont,in my opinion,see any amount of improvements fixing that composition.

First your hampering your self starting from a 1280x1024 image ratio.(5x4)Which was common on earlier laptops but is declining rapidly.

Start BIG and work your way down on the final by reduction and cropping.I often make a 2560x1600 image and judiciosly scale and crop til I reach 1024 x768.With a lot of rezzes in between.(and different aspect ratios)My monitor is a 1920x1200 but my tv is 1920x1080 but no need to make 2 images for those 2 aspect ratios...just set the wall to center and it will display slightly cropped on the tv.

This means you dont need TWO sets of widescreen walls...tho by my own logic,you wouldnt need any 4x3 walls either,only 5x4's.The reason this isnt really so is because 1280x1024 was the only 5x4 ratio that I can thing of that was common.All others were 4x3(the largest being 1600x1200 mostly)

So my long winded post is...work BIG and in widescreen...even if you monitor isnt.(I mean the image,not actually changing your monitors rez to something wrong)haha.

So to continue picking on Uvah(sorry amigo,but this thread is about improving skillsets and everyone reaching for awesome...dont hate me please)(and also listen to WOM,always ask more than ONE person...I could be a jerk for all you know,hehe)

The elements you have chosen to work with dont work for me...they just wouldnt inspire me to finish the work even if just used as a backdrop to paint over.

It dosnt look like you could ever blend all those elements into one coherent image.The different areas all seem to have varying levels of quality...like they were from different artist.

More tutorials,develop skills,work on your eye towards composition...go look at a good photo or art site(the emphasis being on good,not deviant art)(yes,there are good artist there but there are more bad ones mixed in...go somewhere with standards).

Just take some time to LOOK at which images make you go WOW...ones where you can SEE the artist reason for making it.

Sorry for singling you out but I hate to see you spend your time trying to fix something that maybe isnt worth your effort when you could be moving on and trying something better.

Now ask somebody besides me.  hehe

Just to be fair...here is a comp I was working on for fun.I wouldnt upload it for 2 reasons...I cant remember where I got all the original images(even tho I shopped them so much nobody would ever mistake them for the originals) and its still too rough in some places.

Yes it looks pretty cool but I wanted awesome and I just wasnt quite there with it so I shoved it on a backburner to maybe revisit someday.

Its main problems are right in the center where the 3 roads meet...its just too obvious they were shopped together poorly.There are also some bad cloning going on at the sides of the center road.

While I was proud of the rock sculpturing I painted in by hand...the stone lion faces dont look as good as the faces above.Used the same techniques but it just didnt work there.They need reworking.

The car has a bit of forced perspective on it but its a surreal image so I figured I might get away with it.

The angels sword looks awkwardly placed but I liked the fire I added to it.

Theres more but thats the worst of it.

[URL=http://img831.imageshack.us/i/road13a.jpg/][/URL]

Uploaded with [URL=http://imageshack.us]ImageShack.us[/URL]

My laptop, which is what I'm using to create the wall is 1366x768, a small wide screen. I tend to look at dark and gloomy and for some reason think that color in a wall like these are well not keeping with the spirit of the holiday, if that makes any sense. I'm going to scrap the wall and start off like you said. I hadn't really given any thought to going big first and working down. I always thought the opposite. But, that's the whole reason for this thread and no I.R., hate you never but appreciate your honesty and no punches pulled. I'd rather have it that way than someone saying yeah that looks good but ... know what i mean? So ... back to the drawing board and screwing my thinking cap on tighter.lol. Thanks all for your input.

By working larger than you need you give the project room to breathe and it gives you cropping options...so it dosnt all look like a tv show.

Filmmakers frame their comps different for movies than they do for tv. Film isnt afraid to back off and leave some space around the sides.You can always crop closer in and because you started bigger than you needed you wont lose quality.

When I make walls for blinds,they are mostly very close to the size they will be when final...but when I am making art I go way bigger than I need for final.Like over 3000 pixels wide.

I opened CS5 with a new background at 2560x1600 just to get a feel for it. Too bad the trial ends in sixteen days. No biggie though, i still have PS7.

Much. Have you thought of thinning the bush/tree to the left of the house? Just a thought.

Uvah, I addressed that issue with you in a previous thread about resizing walls! Always start large and size down! You loose detail and quality when trying to size up and too many people posting walls do not know how to resize properly and you end up with an inferior image. Oblong moons and such are a real turnoff!

Well no,  I actually had to thicken it because seeing so much sky through the tree reduced the effect of darkness in the image. At one point I had completely removed it but that didn't work out too well!

I still work in 7...for a skinner there really isnt much in later versions that truly helps with skinning in general.They are a little better at some things but not much.

The biggest advances I see in PS lately are the painting tools...but skinners rarely paint...they mostly use shapes,vectors and layerstyles.(7 does all those perfectly fine and is faster at most of it)

There are some screen drawing improvements if you have a good enough graphics card to take advantage of them. Poor ole Brain is still on his emachines W3107...8600 gt.

Tho this is about to change sometime next year...time to build my own sportier model. yay

I had an emachine couple years back. Worked pretty good too. It was my first store bought and just to see how far I could push it I crashed XP inside of a week. Reloaded it and crashed it two more times. Then I quit playing around and found this place. Been going bonkers ever since.