All right I know there are a few of you out there. Here's the way I'd like to play this out. I'll start the game by posting a pic kinda like this:

NOW all you photoshop masters out there take a look at that banner I made and tell me what I used and how I did it. I will let you know that I am using Photoshop CS 2. Whoever is the closest will be the next one to post a pic and let us guess what YOU did. I think this will be a good way to learn for all of us.

 

Layers, opacity, text, pasting in a foreign image, lasso tool for cutting, the elliptical tool for making a selection (circle), and bucket fill to make the inside of the selection blue.

How's that?

 

I'd guess there are about 7 layers
1: Background fill (black)
2: Left Car
3: Middle Car
4: Right Car
4: Text
5: Design
6: design

Unless you merged some of the layers such as the cars and the designs. The Middle car has a transparency so that it's barely visible. The two designs look like they have about an 80% transparency. The blue design is obviously a mopar M and the left design is unfamiliar to me. You might have used inner glow on the two designs unless you found them like that, say for instance you just had a red triangle looking design and gave it a white inner precise glow. I doubt it was that complicated though. Looks like you used the lasso tool to trace the outlines of the cars or you used the erasor tool. It also kinda looks like you used the gradient fill tool to put a little black > transparent fill over the cars. Text is Comic Sans MS

 

Well you're both fairly close. No gradients were used. Matter of fact no effects used whatsoever. Actually there are 8 layers.
1.) Background
2.) left Car
3.) Right Car
4.) Center Car
5.) Text
6.) Dodge Symbol
7.) Mopar M
8.) Super Bee

A few unseen as I have actually 5 different verions of this banner. The symbol on the left (For those that do not recognize it) was the Dodge Symbol in the 50's and 60's. I don't have the image here in class to tell you exact ammounts but I know the center car has something like a 25% transparency and the left and right are at 40% I believe. The 2 symbols have an 80% transparency level (or somewhere close to it) and I never used the fill tool. I merely created the file with a black background vice the standard white. The old Dodge symbol upsets my cuz it's not a very good one (Found an animated GIF I'll be hacking up to replace that one and it looks 500% better due to the fact that I used the magnetic lasso to cut that triangle off a keychain's pic which also surprises me you guys didn't catch the lasso on the Dodge symbol but you did on the cars...). And ICT you definately win this one. Calling out my font even and actually scoring on THAT one is pretty impressive.

Now how did you guys know I used the lasso on the cars vice other methods? And how would you suggest that I make it look a little better? I was thinking blur... Or the Dodge tool...

 

BTW it's your turn ICT you got the closest (I told you guys my starter was an easy one).

 

In the future, use zoom and erasor, it may take a bit longer but it works a LOT better. I'll get something done up today

 

I suck *** at PS...

 

Here ya go, I stayed with the car theme.

 

I'm going to say you likely have quite a few layers... And probably a few layer sets as well... But I'll have to go with:
Lightening:
1.) Gradient
2.) Differance Clouds
3.) Invert
4.) hue/saturation to remove the colors
Cars:
Reflection effect:
Flip verticle,
opacity (Probably a LOW opacity like 10% or so)
Either the lasso or the extract tool to remove both cars and plant them in this image, depending on the facing of the cars possibly a flip horizontal
And I'm seeing some lighting effects but not EXACTLY sure how you did them... Possibly outter glow here as well as the text, and likely making the lightning layer higher up in the chain than the car?
Background:
Gradient (Orange, yellow, orange)
Possibly flipped horizontal as well...
Text:
Text tool
Free Transform Perspective
Outter Glow
And am I seeing some sort of reflection on the text?

 

Hey, I have a full version of Eye Candy if ya want it.