As I’ve mentioned before, certain movie poster titles seem to keep coming up frequently, and this is one of them.  Here is some of the work that was done on this design:

• Something I’ve done a couple times recently is use the healing brush and/or the new content-aware fill tool to fill in the background with a more consistent color and pattern.  I like how it naturally starts to look a lot like a painted background.  I find this technique works pretty well when background is a little too busy, and the subject is pressed up against or covered by some element in the background, so cutting the subject out of the background will look strange.  The healing brush does a great job of naturally covering up seams in cloth, and fading between the colors.  Then I usually put a solid color adjustment layer on top of the background in Color mode, to make sure the colors feel like they’re in the same family.
• Along with “painting” the background, I added some brightening/darkening layers to paint in some extra contrast to the background.
• Other than that, just the basic skin smoothing and cleaning up little distractions with the clone tool.

As always, take a look at the gallery for slightly larger versions of these.  And let me know what you think, or ask questions in the comments section.