t i p s
shiny metals
[Shea|PS4 ) glass, cutout, jiggle, drop shadow, a few selection mask fx and adjustments
[Shea|PS4 ) and some gradients
[Shea|PS4 ) gradients + jiggle can make cool bumpy chrome/mercury effects
[Shea|PS4 ) and a lil glass
making bald spot on characters
PaK-RaT: i just take the dodge tool
PaK-RaT: and rubbed it in his knat really hard
PaK-RaT: on highlight
PaK-RaT: and umm...dood thats all i did :)
PaK-RaT: it makes a big ass bright spot
getting more brushes
PaK-RaT: do u have your assorted brushes open?
PaK-RaT: okay open ps
PaK-RaT: ps open?
PaK-RaT: goto...umm..hold up yeah open the brushes palette
PaK-RaT: load brushes
PaK-RaT: okay if there are 3 brush files choose assorted
weird effect
Frankie: then do destort ripple, and make it really ripply (btw, the lines have to be white) then go back to the layer and load selection from alpha1 (i think) then do inner bevel, but make sure you play around with the lighting after or it will look weired.
tip
shea|QIRC: ah, well....remember that gradients are your friend. Also, the eyecandy cutout filter and drop shadow filter come in useful.
drippings

I do this one with the sweet flux plugin, but you can try the wind filter
vinkka: You do a simple thin line (2 maybe on a separate layer under the part you want the drippings) and apply a blast downward at 10% or less, then paly with ctrl + u to get a color you want.

tv like pictures
vinkka: to get the effect of a tv like picture you should do a single line maybe 1 pixel (transparent backgorund), using the rectangler marquee select depending the space you want between the lines after you do that define pattern (Edit/Define Pattern) and the fill the pattern on a layer on top of the picture.
another metal effect
tenkei: make a new channel
tenkei: filter->render->clouds
tenkei: apply many MANY distortion filters
tenkei: so it looks as random as possible
tenkei: then filter->sketch-> reticulation
tenkei: use this channel and variations of it to paint over your grey area
Q-Ball: what am i supposed to paint?
tenkei: (use the airbrush)
vinkka: airbrush is your friend
tenkei: it will eventually look like metal
tenkei: JUST COLORIZE
tenkei: it's not hard
tenkei: then to add rust just pick some brown color and paint with airbrush set to like 5%
tenkei: that's about it
Alien like drippings or some alien shit
Shea: You should prolly make a quickmask in it's general shape, color the whole thing green (or whatever), give it some blob-like shadows here and there (black airbrush normal 15% pressure), then some highlights here and there (white airbrush color dodge 4% pressure), then run the Artistic > plastic wrap filter over it and fade the filter at like 60% in Color Dodge mode. Might want to do the plastic wrap thing twice.
How do you do that rust effect, it's cooool!
Some guru: very carefully and then some. Use a fuckload of ripple and displacement mapping shit in the channels, that's what I do. And experiment. Nobody teached me this shit, I figured it out myself, so can (and will) you.
rust effect
tenkei: to do the rusty texture:
tenkei: make a new channel
tenkei: filter -> render -> clouds
tenkei: then filter -> sketch -> reticulation
tenkei: lower the contrast
tenkei: load the selection from this channel
tenkei: and paint with the airbrush over the object you want to rust
tenkei: make variations of the channel with various distort filtersload then paint
tenkei: etc
writting on shirts
TheReverendSin: put it in a layer, run distort -> wave on it a bit to make it warbled, then pick an airbush with multiply set, and then add in the shadowing by hand to the letters by follwing the folds with a bit of oppacity