In this tutorial we will be taking a picture of a hand and turning it into a wizard's flaming hand of magic. First we need a good hand, I used the one below from http://www.sxc.hu/ This tutorial is in my "advanced" section, so I am assuming intermediate knowledge of photoshop.

Use your magic want tool to select the white space around your hand, and press delete to remove the white space.

Change the color of your background layer to black, and examine your hand for any extra white pixels. Make touch ups are necessary.

Now we need a little something to texturize our background. Once you have found a desirable image, copy and paste it below your hand layer. Afterwards you can adjust the hue, brightness, and contrast as you see fit. You will see that I have lowered the brightness significantly. We are creating a glowing ball of light, so it will look much more brilliant over a dark background.

Create a circle in the center of your image on a new layer above your hand, and use your polygon selection tool to cut pieces out of the edges. After you have fudged up the edges a bit, apply a radial blur by choosing Filter > Blur > Radial Blur. Choose a quality of best, and type of zoom. Reapply the filter a few times by press Ctrl+F. Then, use your selection too to subtract the thumb from your radiating light. The easier way to do this is to hide your light layer, and use your polygon selection tool to select an outline of your thumb. Unhide the light layer and delete your selection, you should have something similar to mine.

Create a new layer, and use your paintbrush tool to create some random blotches of white, as shown below.

Apply a radial blur again by pressing Ctrl+F, or choosing it from the menu. Change the layer mode to Overlay, and duplicate your layer if you want the light beams to appear more strongly.

Create a new layer and use your ellipse tool to create a circle in the palm of your hand. Apply a radial gradient of light orange and dark orange. Create a new layer above your orange circle, and create a reflection using a white-transparent gradient.

Create a new layer, and Ctrl+Click your orange ball layer to get the selection. Capture a picture of your screen by pressing the "print screen" button on your keyboard, and then choose Edit > Past Into to past your capture into your selection. Edit the scale of your capture screen by choose Edit > Transform > Scale. Reduce the size and center the image so that a reduced image of the piece you are working on is shown in the orb. This will act as a reflection.

Reduce the opacity of this reflection layer so the orange color of your orb is not overpowered. Next use the same method we used in the beginning to select an outline of your thumb, and delete the selection from your orb layers. You now have three layers you need to delete this selection from.

Use your burn tool to darken your original orange ball layer where shadows would naturally appear. This will help to enhance the illusion that this ball is being held by the hand.

Next I decided that i didn't like how plain the wrist of the hand looked, and found an image to overlay into it. I searched http://www.sxc.hu/ from "vines" and copied the image below into my canvas. I changed the layer mode the overall, and erased the extraneous parts.

Finally I added some text, and we are done! Here is how mine turned out.