My good friend Ivan over at CreativeBits has an interesting post for laptop owners who use Adobe Photoshop. Check out Trackpad Gestures in Photoshop for a list of what he's found.

For the most part, I use a mouse. But it's great to know that when I'm on the road with my MacBookPro, these trackpad gestures are available - saving time and probably hand-cramps.

Creating fancy logos, title graphics and stylized type generally requires a lot of work. And depending on whether you use Adobe Illustrator or Photoshop, you’re probably going to end up with layer upon layer of gradients, strokes and bevels.

Thankfully, Path Styler Pro 1.5 solves all those problems no matter which program you use, producing high-quality graphics with a noticeable ease of use.

Read my full review of Path Styler Pro at Macworld.com's Creative Notes blog.

Among the numerous resources that can be found over at CreativeBits are a set of image templates for identity design. These "blanks" are perfect for showing off your design ideas to clients.

There are around 200 images in 5 different categories available. The downloads are broken up by category and are anywhere between 7 and 17MB each.

You can download the templates here. The download links for each category are below the photos.

If you're running Photoshop Elements 6, you may have had an issue where none of the effects or layer styles would appear in the Effects palette if you're running under a non-admin account.

For most users, this won't be a problem. But if you work in a corporate environment, you may not have an admin account, in which
this post over at MacOSXHints will fix your problem. Of course, you probably need admin access in order to use this tip...

There are many ways to convert an image from color to black & white in Adobe Photoshop. I've posted tips before about this, but with Photoshop CS3, there's a dead-simple way to do it that produces great results, and offers you the ability to fine-tune your conversion.

Instead of simply selecting Image>Grayscale to convert your image to B&W, select Image>Adjustments>Black&White (Command + Option + Shift + B for you keyboard shortcut junkies).

In the resulting Black and White conversion dialog box, you'll be presented with the opportunity to adjust various colors in the conversion process. If you're familiar with how this works, you can adjust how each color in your image converts to gray. If that's a little more work than you wish to do, you can simply click on the image and move your cursor around to have Photoshop automatically adjust your image based on the sampled color.

As you can see in the image above, the normal Convert to Grayscale method produces a flat and quite dull image. Though this may work for some images, using the Black and White Adjustment allows you to to fine-tune your conversion to give you more contrast and retain more details in the image.

One of the more popular text effects to use in Adobe Photoshop is chrome text. You can search for hours to find the perfect Layer Style to make your job easy, but you may never find it.

Instead, try this Metal Text Tutorial over at PSGallery.co.uk. The tutorial is easy to follow and can produce fantastic results with a little experimentation. From personal experience, I've found that your results will vary widely depending on the font you choose to use. Some areas to play with are the bevel settings and variations. While the tutorial does give you exact settings to use, you will most likely find that they don't produce the desired effect on all fonts. Play around with them to get it to look the way you want.

It's getting harder and harder to find useful tutorials in Photoshop. Sure, there are plenty of cool effects out there, but how many are actually useful in day-to-day work?

Today I have one of those rare tutorials that will show you something you can use. A Minor Studios shows you how to create a glowing curtain in Photoshop.

As seen in the image above, the effect can be used to create some nice background effects for your next project. But the best part is that it takes just a few seconds to create, using basically two filters and a few layer adjustments. The effect is easily customizable to your needs, too.

Sharpening
An often unused sharpening method in Photoshop involves the use of Unsharp Mask and blend modes. Choose Filter>Sharpen>Unsharp Mask and apply the settings that you desire. Once you're done, choose Edit>Fade Unsharp Mask and change the Blend Mode to Luminosity. By doing it this way, as opposed to converting the image to Lab mode and sharpening the Luminosity channel, you have the added benefit of reducing the amount of sharpening at the same time if you don't like the amount you've already applied.

Brush sizes
You can easily change the size of your brush in photoshop without visiting the brush panel by hitting the left and right bracket keys [ and ].

Creating quick selections
If you want to create a selection of the outline of a layer in Photoshop, simply Command + Click on the layer icon.

Reposition marquee selections
If you have made a selection with the rectangular Marquee tool in Photoshop and decide half way through that you didn't quite start the selection in the right spot, you can move it without starting over. Before you're finished making the selection, hold down the Spacebar and reposition your selection. This tip also works with the Crop and Shape tools.

Adding text on top of text
Ever notice that when you're working in Photoshop and you have a text layer and you're trying to create a new text layer that it's nearly impossible to click in the spot you want without selecting the existing text?

To get around this little headache, all you have to do is hold the Shift key down as you click with the Type tool. By doing this, Photoshop ignores the existing text layers.

Quickly resize paths
If you have a path you've carefully drawn in Photoshop and decide that you want to resize it, you have a simple solution. Using the Path Component Selection tool (it's the solid black arrow, NOT the Move tool), click your path to make it active and take a look at the Options Bar. Click on the checkbox that says Show Bounding Box — this gives you a transform bounding box much like Free Transform. Now just drag the bounding box as normal to resize.

Lower your new layer
Did you know that when you create a new layer in Photoshop and you want it to be automatically created BELOW the currently active layer, all you have to do is hold down the Command key and click the New Layer icon at the bottom of the Layers palette.

Creating a "floating" layer from a selection
You probably knew that if you want to duplicate a layer in Photoshop, all you have to do is hit Command + J to make an exact copy of the active layer. But did you know you can float a selection as well?

Make a selection on the active layer and hit Command + J and only the selection will be copied (or floated) to a new layer, rather than the entire layer.

When you're trying to crop an image close to the edge of the document in Photoshop, you may notice that the crop tool always wants to "snap" to the edge of the document, or close to a layer object edge. This is a result of Photoshop's Snap To feature, which normally is quite handy!

Hold down the Control key to turn off the Snap To feature, temporarily allowing you to freely size your crop area.

PSDTuts has a spectacular tutorial titled Super Fast and Easy Facial Retouching. There are plenty of these tuts floating around, but this one is particularly easy and highly adaptable. Plus, it includes a link to a downloadable preset for Photoshop's Curves dialog box that produces stunning color adjustment with little to no work on your end.

Dezinerfolio has put together a collection of over 100 Web 2.0-style Photoshop Layer Styles, free for download.

These beautiful PS Layer Styles come hot on the heels of another great Web 2.0 collection of Gradients recently released for download.

Surf by and grab your Photoshop add-ons and start saving time on your current Web design project.

Matt Kloskowski over at Layers Magazine offers some insight on how to use the Spot Healing Brush in Adobe Photoshop and maintain flexibility by healing one layer onto a separate layer in this Flash-based video.

The Spot Healing Brush is much underused in my opinion. Too often, designers jump right to the cloning tool without even thinking of this little gem.

If you want to change the font, color, kerning, or any other character or paragraph attributes, simply Command + Click or Shift + Click the type layers you want to edit, then adjust the settings to your liking in the Control Bar, Character or Paragraph panels.

This tips works in Adobe Photoshop CS1, CS2 and CS3.

Photoshop has a lot of cool features, and CS3 added lots more that required me to take another look at all the menus. Recently, I found something I had never seen before. It's called Zoomify.

The image you see above, which you can zoom in and out of and scroll around in, started as a 920x400 pixel image. I then went to File>Export>Zoomify in Photoshop CS3 and entered in a few settings as seen below.

When finished, an html file is created in the folder I designated, along with the appropriate files needed to create the Zoomified image.

I then tweaked the html code a bit, uploaded the folder to my server, and pasted the code into this post.

That's it. All that is required to view the image is the latest version of Flash (older Flash browser plugins may work, but I don't have an old version to test). Pretty cool, eh?!

A set of Photoshop brushes made up of various "urban" designs, as vectors. All very high resolution, with the average brush size being about 1600 pixels.

Includes: barbed wire, buildings, chain link fence, various circles, street lamps, miscellaneous vector designs, razor wire, smoke, a smokestack, vector splatters, telephone poles, and more!

Grab your urban brushes from Obsidian Dawn here.