Photoshop: Illumination Art Effects

This tutorial is an excellent display of artistic talent, but unfortunately is not very clear in terms of a novice or intermediate Photoshop user being able to reproduce the results.

The explaining text is quite vague and the changes from step to step seemed like hours of work condenses into a simple phrase and a screenshot. A screen cap of the layers palette would have also helped. Despite all this there are some nuggets of information to glean for people who are not aware how some of the photoshop layers styles work with illustrating.