Why should we limit the fun in Adobe Photoshop to the digital world? You can combine old-school art with digital darkroom techniques to create Photoshop brushes for painting and masking. By painting on actual paper first, you'll create original Photoshop brushes that look more authentic than purely digital art. Then you'll vary size, angle, and hue of the brushes in Photoshop, and use them for painting and for masking parts of existing artwork.Step 1read more

In this example of turning a photograph into a drawing, professional artist and Photoshop expert Bert Monroy shows you how to make a photograph look like a hand-drawn image on canvas. First, you'll open a portrait in Photoshop and turn the entire image into a pattern (Select > All, Edit > Define Pattern). You'll duplicate the image in a new layer, then apply the Find Edges filter (Filter > Stylize). read more

Step 1Create a new document. The dimensions don't really matter, but I started with a new document that's 470 pixels by 350 pixels, RGB, and 72 dpi. Fill it with White.Go to Filter > Noise > Add Noise. Enter the settings below, then press OK.Step 2To begin to form the base for the wood grain, go to Filter > Blur > Motion Blur. Use the settings below and press OK.read more

This tutorial is courtesy of the Russell Brown Show.Photoshop CS5's Content-Aware Fill feature intelligently fills in an area with texture that matches the surrounding pixels. While Content-Aware Fill is an amazing retouching tool that just about any Photoshop user can benefit from, its defaults are more successful on some photos than others. (Don't have Photoshop CS5? Download the free trial.)read more

The makers of the Fanta soft drink are running a multi-part ad campaign that uses an interesting effect that's very easy to achieve: read more

Alicia Buelow is one of those Photoshop artists whose unique style helps her produce memorable images. Once you've seen her work, it can be difficult to get the images out of your head.In a tutorial written by Buelow and in a follow-up interview with her, you'll learn how this illustrator and designer uses Photoshop to create her signature style. Photoshop How-Toby Alicia Buelowread more

The technique of "unwinding" a face was first explored by the Dutch artist M.C. Escher, who specialized in unlikely and impossible drawings. In this tutorial, you’ll start there and add a twist (pun intended) by including a ghosted version of the original face inside the winding helix, so you can see even those parts of the face that are missing.Here's the final image. Click on it to see a larger version.read more

This tutorial is courtesy of the Russell Brown Show.Content-Aware Fill is a jaw-dropping feature, new to Photoshop CS5, that intelligently matches the lighting, tone, and noise levels of surrounding areas as you retouch a photo. But here's one use you might not have thought of for Content-Aware Fill: filling in the empty corners that result when you rotate a photo to straighten it.read more