Betty Blue Movie Poster

This is another tutorial from Practical Photoshop magazine. The point of this tutorial was to recreate a Betty Blue style movie poster. I really liked this tutorial and it was one of the only ones that turned out just like how it looks in the magazine. First Camera Raw (which I have never used before this) was used to manipulate the original images to get a more high quality result. Next, several different gradients were used on the background layer to get the desired effect. I have used gradients before but I didn't know what the different kinds meant. There is foreground to transparent and foreground to background and I did not know what the difference was until this tutorial. I used the polygonal lasso tool to cut the face and arms out from the background and then used adjustment layers to hide the remaining parts of the background and to blend the model into the sky and make her features stand out against the dark sky.

My image:

Image from the tutorial: