The basket is too sharp edged in comparison to the rounded edges of the rest of the sculpture.

By comparison, the "neck" of the sculpture where the head was removed is too soft and rounded, making it look lumpy and somewhat "melted." A bit sharper "break" edge would better convey the headlessness. You may also want to clone in some of the leaf pattern behind the neck to better blend the space with the background.

To get rid of the sharp edged basket, try to use a little bit Gaussian Blur. Or just use the Blur Tool. A little lighting to the "neck" should make an illusion to the headless stone. Btw, where's the so called Crow? It's too dark to see the crow standing by the "neck". Try to add a little highlights to the Crow's feathers that reflect the lights/sun rays.

Hope it helps. Awesome idea, Author.

Thanks for the tips!

The neck looks much better, but now you've increased the overall contrast too much, making the brights look "blown out" to almost pure white, which really makes the ground look bad, almost like a poor infra-red effect...

Also, although you've now softened the basket, it shows NO highlights to correspond to the rest of the statue. You may have to hand paint those in with either the Paintbrush, or the Dodge tool.

Perhaps you should add a bit of the green color of the foliage back into the image?

Great composition, lovely sky. SBS is well done! .

wow.... beautiful job., perfect for a fantasy magazine's cover.....

awesome...... IMO the entry is perfect now.....

Beautiful entry.... good luck!

Brilliant idea and good execution, some how the colors and subjects suggested me you're the author, and bingo! I have some suggestions for this work, even though it's really good now. Some how I feel you missed one intermediate point, this is when the bird land in the well. I had a bit difficulty to figure out what's going on and I think because of that missing part, and if you have one more creature that totally separated from the well, that will even be more fantastic. The second thing is about the composition, it's quite neat now, but you still can improve...

Because you chose the portrait frame, the way of arranging the birds in a curve queue like this is reasonable, but on the other side, the new creature is flying into the area that limited by this curve. Regarding the idea of this piece, to me, it's a kind of incomplete transformation. How about using landscape frame? so you can arrange the birds on the left and the new creature on the right, you have wide landscape and be able to modify the two parts of the sky to fit the subjects. Just from my angle. Wish you the best of luck with this contest !

Thanks langstrum, as usual your comments are much appreciated. This was a hard one; my original image did have a bird flying into the Well but I took it out as I was not happy with it but you could be right ... maybe I need to do another photo shoot with crows as the one I had just didn't look right. About the format ... maybe if I change it (back) to Landscape it would look better. I will have to give that a try! Again thanks!!!

And thank you to everyone for the wonderful comments

Great image and SBS!

jajaja A LA MIERDA!

Great palindrome and interpretation! Decent blending job too!

Excellent rendition and good blending work you have here author. Good luck to your entry!

great blend!

Very nice blending and idea

Very nice blend author, GL!

Kudo's!

Top blend author...very well done

Excellent blend author....best of luck!!

Love the morph job. Nicely put together.

Nice job. Nice feel to the coldness of this image.

Nice Work!

This would be an awesome poster! Great for the bathroom...ya know...when you need something to do lol. Or waiting rooms or just a simple poster. Great colors, WONDERFULLY put together. I bet it did take you a long time, wow. You are very creative, great job, author!

This looks woawesome, to say at least. And Hi-res is a MUST SEE!

Thanks so much! now that you mention it, I bet this would look great in my bathroom hahah!

really brilliant!

Super work, I had fun looking through it = )

This is amazing!!!!! So clever and well thought out, and I like how you've chosen to use a monochromatic (sort of) color scheme with silhouettes, keeping the individual images simple since there are so many of them.

Congrats!!!

Congrats for your third place! You set a record with your source links!

Congrats and really amazing work!

Congrats!