kickass pic rey !

I'm not sure what you mean by layer sliders but I think I see how you wrapped the texture with liquify. Liquify looks like something that will take some practice.
I learned masks today and I understand that you need to cut out from the mask to reveal the actual layer. One thing I can't figure out though is how you can see both the face and the woodgrain equally. How come when you removed that face section of your mask it still shows the face instead of just woodgrain? Theres something big here that I am not quite figuring out.

DS,

See on my reply the picture of the layer style

See where it says "blend mode" (under "general blending")? Play with that setting. If you set it to overlay, or hard light, or soft light or multiply or whatever you get different effects. Try them all. It's fun!

I actually didn't use liquify once on that image. I did use a displacement map, and as rey said, many layers and blend modes and layer masks. As he mentions, play around with these modes and opacities and you can get amazing results. What helped me learn these techniques was ledirlo's tut on this site about blend modes, and then just practicing a lot.

http://photoshopcontest.com/tutorials/7/blending-layer-modes.html
Here is that tut Cal was talking about.

I think with that sort of image with alot of form to cover, the easiest and most succesful way would to use the displacement tool, if the shape was more simple then the liquidfy tool would prolly work just as well.

this topic is really really usefull. thx evelyn for your tutos and everyone else.
i think i'll be close to master the displacement tool after passing trough this.
woot