Picture Editing

I was playing around with picture editing on a website called befunky.com and came across some good edits. I chose a random picture of the artist Nicole Scherzinger and started playing around. Here is what I came up with which is shown below. The first picture is original picture I started from. 

Click on image to show original size 

By doing this, this gave me ideas of how I would like my front cover picture to be like with different types of edits and which one looks more effective. Also, since I am thinking of basing my magazine on the genre Hip Hop, I think by from the research I have seen images taken of other famous Hip Hop artists, most of their images are either photoshoped or edited to show the intensity of the picture.