I used the tree from another PXL-contest. Actually that was an maybe-entry for that contest, but I didn't uploaded it. But that's exactly, what I wanted here, to I used it for this entry.
The long branch was made with a part of the tree and a lot of copy and paste.
step 3 of 9
Here is the love
step 4 of 9
And the grief
step 5 of 9
I made a selection of the flower pictures and arranged the other pictures above it.
step 6 of 9
I masked the ivy (thanks a million to robvdn for his How To Mask A Tree In 3 Minutes tutorial!)
The ivy has two layers. One with blending mode set to hard light and one with a normal blending mode.
And I arranged the gate and the background behind it.
step 7 of 9
Adding the frames and hope
step 8 of 9
The writing and the heart were made with bevel and emboss. I can't tell the exact settings, cause I'm not able to find a translation for these settings :/
step 9 of 9
And to give it a warm feeling, I used a yellow fotofilter with the amount of 35, copied this layer, used gaussian blur with the amount of 5 and set the blending mode to soft light with opacity to 70%