Trying for a cool urban photo

You have the concept down, but all the rubble varies from very light to very dark, and as such makes for a very busy foreground and background.

A good way to go for a low key effect is to put a vignette on it. Using the Elliptical Marquee Selection tool feathered a 60 pixels, I drew an oval just around her, selected the inverse and darkened the outside of the oval with the Brightness/Contrast control. I repeated the process with a larger oval.

I also cropped the image so her face and sneakers form three points of a triangle, and then put an edge treatment on it.

If you don't find my suggestions helpful, just let me know by email and I will be glad to delete them.

Steve,

Thanks for the comment, I do like the corrections and will use them in the future.

The face and sneakers already form a triangle. All the other stuff is just digital masturbaton that amounts to making an image selectively darker and blowing some of the parts of it (like the sneakers and the exposed skin above the ankle)into some neon crayon radioactive nightmare... Though the tighter crop seems to work - then again the simulated overmat does what overmats do - this is no exception.

What makes a photo have urban feel? This is a decent pixelograph of a pretty girl in an admireable attempt at an original setting.

But an urban feel? I get the "feel" that a nice girl was dragged out of a suburban home on a saturday morning, right after a nice breakfast while mom and dad went shopping or perhaps golfing. Or perhaps it was dad himself - if he is a young, hip dad - who wielded the photocomputer. What you could have done behind the "camera" is gone to an urban centre, and captured something uniquely "urban". I have ruins like that a half hour from my home - they are the remnants of a barn. In a field. Not urban just because its broken. To get feel, you need context and suggestions of what you are driving at - even if its done through technique or choice of media. Then again, what do I know, I don't even have photoshop... :)