Our first mistake, and probably the one that bothers me the most, is the Difference Clouds Filter.  You can find this filter by going to Filter / Render / Difference Clouds.  It seems that everybody wants to use this filter for making their "the best website ever" homepage backgrounds.  For some reason, people only seem to use black and red, black and blue, black and gray, or black and green.  This is a cheap way to make a quick background for images, and if you can't try adding a few extra effects to it to make it somewhat unique, then stay away from it.

What's even sadder, I saw this effect used in the movie "Ghost Ship" when the guy is showing aerial photos of said ship to the scavenger crew.  All the artist did was get a photo of a normal ship and use the Difference Clouds filter once, and said "that looks good" and let it be.  So as you can see, laziness affects even professionals.

This is just as annoying, it's the Craquelure Texture, which is French for "I have no creativity at all and shredded wheat-looking textures are cool LOL!".  You can get to it by going to Filter / Texture / Craquelure, but don't.  You're better off not ever using this piece of crap excuse for a texture.  People use this all the time for their web page backgrounds as well, and they don't ever seem to put any color in it or even try to mess with the controls so it always comes out looking like the picture here.  If you want a texturized background, I have tutorials on how to do that. Don't EVER use this filter...or you will...die or something...

As an added note, you can also now see this piece of shit excuse for a texture on most DVD movie FBI Warning screen now, although it is tinted blue and has a gradient. Holy shit, that's creativity right there.

Now, I'm not saying lens flares are bad, not at all.  I use them all the time myself...just not these.  Photoshop has a crappy lens flare filter you can access by going to Filter / Render / Lens Flare.  The problem is that you only get the very 3 types of flares you see in that picture and they have been that way since the first release of Photoshop.  Amazingly, Adobe FINALLY added like 2 new options in Photoshop CS.

The second problem is the over-use of flares.  Don't put twenty flares on your character's sword or armor.  It gets to the point where you can't even see the drawing anymore, it just looks like your hero fell into a box of fireworks.

This is the final pet peeve of mine.  Many times, someone does a drawing and they use the Lighting Effect filter.  You can find this by going to Filter / Render / Lighting Effects.  They try to make their drawing look dramatic by using this filter.  If only one person ever in the world used this filter, it would be unique.  However, everyone and all their friends uses this thing, therefore, making it "trendy".