>>1646331Try Silhouette, ZBrush or PFDepth. They allow you to view your depth map as a 3D model while you work on it. They also have vector-based tools to make depth maps which is easier for tweaking things. Silhouette has a thingy called S3D which takes a rough depth map and incorporates image details into it to extract more depth information from it, it works OK depending on the image.
An alternative way to do it quickly is using ZBrush, a 3D sculpting software, takes a short while to get into though. You basically just plaster your image on a 3D plane, then sculpt away until it approximates the image, and render out a depth map. It's a very intuitive workflow, the sculpting tools are much more suitable than manually painting out a depth map.
Unfortunately PFDepth isn't properly cracked yet, the 2012 version is very unstable, the 2013 crashes after 20 minutes and kills your project. PFDepth a very good software for dimensionalization, but Silhouette is the only one that works atm. It's a fair bit weaker on the manual editing, but having the 3D preview is invaluable. It can also preview the side-by-side 3D result as you work on it, or anaglyph if you got some glasses, but you need 2 monitors to fit all of that on your desktop.
And as for Photoshop, try using more masked gradients for major areas instead of manual painting.
