Photoshop: Creation of Gone With the Wind

This tutorial is not to be seen as a step-to-step guide to create the image, as it's only showcasing the process of the photo manipulation. Hopefully it will give you ideas of how to create your own images. Notice that this tutorial was written for Adobe Photoshop CS3.
All images used in this tutorial are copyright © Stock Exchange, Peace-of-Art, Lock Stock and Resurgere.

Step 1

I already had an idea in mind when I started this manipulation, so all I had to do was to select images from my huge image gallery. I started out with creating a 900x1600 sized document.
After that, I started putting together the images. I needed images for a background, a woman, flowers and textures.

Step 2

After adding the main background image of the water, I added and masked (erased the unwanted parts the image) of the clouds and set the layer to Linear Light (which blended in well and had the strength I wanted).

Step 3

I added and masked the image of the ice river which I set to Hard Light (which blended in well, and let the water come through). After that, I decided to add the image I had extracted earlier of the woman. I used the Move tool's aligning options to place her at the bottom center of the image.
At this point, I also went over her skin with the Blur, Smudge and Healing Brush tools.

Step 4

Since I had cut off all of the original image's flowing hair, I added my own by using the Smudge tool at various strength's and brush sizes. I also used the Brush tool to draw additional strands. There are probably tons of better ways to achieve this, such as using hair from another photo or simply showing off your amazing painting skills.

Step 5

As for the next step, I did some slight changes to the hair and started the "shattering" process. The shattering was created by selecting random parts with the Lasso tool and moving them using the Move tool. I didn't want to destroy too much of her body, so I created a duplicate of the original and used it to create more shattered pieces. The parts of the duplicate that weren't needed, I masked out.
I also added some color to her lips, added some slight blush on her cheek and drew the eyelashes.

Step 6

I wanted to add a slight shattered effect to her skin, which I did by applying a texture set to Soft Light, and duplicating it once to strengthen the effect. I then added another texture to the lower part of her clothes which I set to Soft Light. I erased the parts that I didn't want of both textures by masking.

Step 7

I created some slight fog by going over the image with a white soft brush, which layer I set to Soft Light. At this point, I realized the cracks on her chest lacked depth, so I used the Lasso tools to fill in the areas with pure black. I set the black layers to Multiply at 52% opacity to make it look more natural.

Step 8

The image felt quite empty, but I still wanted it to stay simple. I grabbed the image of the flower and extracted it, then made several duplicates of it. The Transform (edit - transform) and the Shear filter were used to give the duplicates a different look. I tried to make it look as if the flowers were sucked into the sky along with the shattered pieces.

Step 9

At this point, I felt finished with the image itself. The only thing left was to fix the colors, as they looked ugly and not the slightest appealing. It also lacked the contrast I wanted.
To add a special touch to the image, I applied the brown paper texture at Multiply at 75% opacity. After adding the texture, I used four Black & White Adjustment Layers (CS3 only) to desaturate the image and give it the contrast I wished for. The last thing I did to the image was to add a Level Adjustment Layer to slightly alter the colors.
The final image can be viewed below.