Here I'm gonna do a bit of walkthru of how I go about making an image. This is just my way of doing things and I'm sure there are a million other ways to get more or less the same result so don't take this as "This is how you do it, every other way suck" or anything :)

Well like all other poser users I usually start by loading the figure of my choice, in this case V4.

Then I continue with adding morphs, clothes, pose, props and lighting etc. this is mainly a trial and error thing..
I try something, see how it looks and if I like it I keep it, if not I scrap it and try something else, for instance I quite like tilted camera angles..
I usually have an idea of what I want before I start, but it usually ends up being something completely different once I'm done in poser :p The poser bit is probably more important than I deem it, but for me the real work is done in photoshop so I wanna get in there as soon as possible..

For instance in this particular case it would probably have been easier to do 2 different renders in poser.. one of the foreground and one of the background.. easier to get the illusion of depth of field if you can just blur the background and then leave it be.. but I was impatient and did a work-around in photoshop instead.. we'll get to that in a minute
I always save my renders as .png.. and I render big.. usually in the 4000x3000 at 300 dpi range..

Allright.. lets head into photoshop
The lighting in poser decides which background sky I use in the image... this time it needed to be a red sunset-ish sky

So we open our background sky of choice and just drag the poser render ontop of it and position it where it seems to "fit"
This time I opted to duplicate the background sky and set the layer mode to multiply on the top copy to darken it up a bit.. and to avoid it getting too dark I lowered the opacity of it a bit aswell..

Now we get to the depth of field part.. since Jen is very impatient we need to do the DOF here in photoshop from just a single render.. so we duplicate the layer and blur the top copy.. quite alot of blur..
then we have to take the erazer and clear up over the character and everyting we want to have clear in the foreground.. so in this case the entire first "totem-platform"...

After that we start on the hair, using a base hair is nice cause then you only really have to add a bit to it and not paint the entire thing.. so here I add some strands and make it less straight..
I start by sampeling the darkest colour in the base hair..and paint with a 3pixel soft brush.. then I take a little bit lighter colour and do the same thing.. and then a little bit lighter again and so on.. the last few times I go down to a 2 pixel brush..
If I were to work at a smaller size render I would go down to a 1 pixel brush instead

Now I wanna add some flamy smoky feel to the skulls.. so here's how I do that
I start with a darkish red.. and fill in more or less the whole eye socket.. and finish off with some blur..

Then I make a new layer, set it to overlay and get a very light red/yellow.. almost white but not quite.. and a smaller brush and make a dot at around the area where we want the glow to be
then add a new layer, set to overlay again and an even smaller brush, and again make a dot where we want the center of the glow to be.

then I dig up my smoke brushes, there are millions of these around on various resource sites and they're usually free to use, but make sure you check the terms of use before you use them..
I tend to only use things that are ok for commercial use incase an image turns out good and I wanna sell prints of it..

and here aswell I start with a dark red, then do some orange and finish off with some yellow..

This image I want to call Hellgate, so I want it to be quite red and saturated so I add a layer on top with a gradient colour tint and set it to soft light.. I usually start with the pre-made orange-purple one and then change the colour on that via the hue/saturation slider til I find what I want

and after that I make a new layer again and set it to multiply and grab a big brush, usually a 300 soft one.. and paint a little around the edges of the image.. then hit gaussian blur and adjust the opacity of the layer till I think it looks good..
This is something that I personally think frames the image better.. usually.. not always :)

and that's about it.. after that I flatten.. make some final colour adjustments and save a big version of the image first.. then re-size to a proper posting size in galleries ( which I think should be so you can see the whole image on screen at the same time.. which makes a "standard" size hard to say, since ppl have different size monitors and resolutions.. but if you have to scroll you won't see the entire composition at once and it usually takes away more than it adds, then it's better to post a detail shot separately if there are really fine details you wanna show off :)
and lastly I usually hit sharpen once and fade it till it looks ok :)

Hope that helped to get a better idea of how I usually work with my images.. feel free to contact me if you have any questions about something I mentioned here or something I didn't mention here for that matter aswell ;)

-Jen