A bit of a comment if you do not mind.
Although I own Photoshop, Corel and Gimp I prefer to use an older program called Picture Publisher 10 a company that was bought by Corel and then put out of business.
It gives me actual manual control and selective editing. Although it requires more work and time I have immensely more control and a greater feeling of accomplishment than the automated functions of those other graphic programs.
The above image required the merging of 8 individual component layers with edits and many tweaks to get the effect desired.