Some headers I like

I chose these three because they are artistically appealing to me.
They are not like every other page on the internet but at the same time they function well.

http://firewheeldesign.com/

http://emotionslive.co.uk/

http://www.mastres.com/

New Header

I used JF Georgian Contrast. It came with Fireworks on the mac.
I used drop shadow and raised emboss filter. It gave it a very three dimensional effect.
The best image with smallest size was Png 8 with 16 colors.

Images

Here is a JPG http://www.flickr.com/photos/splat/49792783/in/set-981332/ at the main link.
Well, it's a picture of a whole site.

Here is a Gig http://www.cwsomaha.com/templates/cwsomaha.com/images/widget.gif
It's from site http://www.cwsomaha.com/

This site has some nice ones.
http://emotionslive.co.uk

http://emotionslive.co.uk/portfolio/realsize/20060609003709.jpg
http://emotionslive.co.uk/img/logo.gif

I couldn't find a png at the sites you mentioned but i did find one at Apple.
http://images.apple.com/macmini/images/features_hero20090303.png
http://www.apple.com/macmini/features.html

It seems that 99% of the images are jpgs

more egypt

This is just a simple crop around the borders. I used the small jpg at 40%

more egypt

Here is the photo that I did the gradient exercise with. It didn't come out great but the instructions were hard to follow and had some mistakes so I had to it from scratch several times to get to this point.

This is jpeg small at 86%. The picture already looked blurry because of the gradient so it looked really bad if I made the quality any less.

sphynx

This is a picture I took that I cropped using the pen tool.
A small jpg at 40% was good enough. The background is all white now.

blogs

I found the following examples of various color schemes

http://www.freelanceswitch.com/ monochromatic green

http://www.ndesign-studio.com/ triadic chartreuse, magenta, orange

http://css-tricks.com/ analagous different kinds of brown

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ split complementary

http://www.techcrunch.com/ monochromatic

http://www.boingboing.net/ triadic

http://mashable.com/ analogous

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/ split complementary

http://www.tmz.com/ desaturated red
http://www.readwriteweb.com/ saturated red


http://www.cinematical.com/ liked this site

nice template http://www.eblogtemplates.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/02/dilectio-blogger-med.jpg