From Europe - Title Piece for Collage

This is a title piece put together for my son's collage. Six pictures were used, selecting portions of each using a 50-pixel feather. They were then blended together using layers, spilling over the outside edges so there would be a hard border.

One of the goals here was to work with the lettering. 98% of my Photoshop work is done in Elements 7, but especially in the lettering I've found it necessary at times to utilize the CS3 version for full control. It may be difficult to see here, but the letter fill is only at 85% opacity, which is what was used to build the pre-loaded effect for Elements. I opened the document in CS3 with the objective of upping that to 100%, but ultimately decided to leave as is...