This took 3 days to do in Photoshop and Illustrator
 

What do you think?
I've been working in Photoshop and Illustrator for... Less than a year. But right now it is my passion in life. This is my latest project.

Click here to see

Nitemare, that was a bit too harsh. I think you should give constructive criticism in stead of blatant below the belt blows. Also, not everyone is gifted with photoshop and art itself so it's not like you should be judging someone's talent that harshly when they've only been working on honing thier skills for less than a year. One cannot expect perfection out of everyone at the beginning. For clarification, I've been doing work like this for several years now in which I started back in '98; I have seen many people and many levels of talent and I can attest that practice is key and that no one gets that good without it on the scale of majority.

I think for a beginner, it's good. It could use a bit more spice and perhaps more work on detail and edges but other than that it's pretty good. I would try working on your ability to smooth the text out some more though.

Jeeeez. Talk about harsh. I don't think it's half bad. Not even "for a beginner".
I think it shows a distinct lack of suckiness. The point, as near as I can figure, is that you can stick other words in there and they will look like a comet, yes?
It's not necessarily a stand alone piece to like... frame and hang on a wall as much as some pretty nifty graphic design. But correct me if I'm wrong about that.
And I'm not seeing where the edges are bad...
And it really does glow, which is more than a lot of amateurs can accomplish.

It didn't take hours each day.
In all, the time I spent on it was probably about 2 hours.

And yeah I noticed the text thing.. When I imported it from illustrator it did that, I blurred it slightly to get rid of some of it, but it didn't work all the way I guess.

And I think sticking a cow in there would make it worse..

Not everything has to have hand draw things in it. I've seen plenty of Mind-blowing things that were created solely in Illustrator and Photoshop.

I think you should add more smoke, and make the end of the fire blue. Blue is the hottest part of the flame. It starts out as orange, yellow, blue. It'll make a cool screen saver I suppose...If it moved...

pretty cool