www.tutorialized.com is superb for creating supreme effects in photoshop and many many other editors.
Allowing images in banners for 'Registered Users' may be fairly difficult to manage as I doubt there is a way to limit what can be placed in signatures if the links/images permission is lifted. For this, its probably best if a mod creates a signature for the F@H member/team.
Donald, I love your thinking in post 15 above, there are some great ideas in there that are well worth thinking about for this project.