Beauty retouching is probably one of the most popular application areas in which Adobe Photoshop is used extensively. There are two simple reasons for that. First, Photoshop offers a variety of advanced tools to smooth out skin and hair, optimize body proportions and emphasize some beautiful details. And second, if you have some experience with Photoshop it is easy to learn the basics and quickly produce very impressive and beautiful results.

Of course, beauty-retouching is a quite deceptive art. The masters of Photoshop create illusions which are hard to tell apart — unless you have both a genuine photo and the final result in Photoshop and can directly compare them. In fact, every day we consume perfectly retouched stars and models online and offline which just look different in the real life.

Still, it is not the reason to avoid learning advanced Photoshop techniques for beauty-retouching and study examples of how it is done in practice. The list below presents both image-tutorials as well as video-tutorials. Most examples have a before-vs.-after-comparison and you can follow the modifications with Photoshop step-by-step.

You may want to take a look at the further Photoshop tutorials selections we’ve presented earlier:

• Adobe Photoshop Tutorials: Best Of
• Adobe Photoshop Video Tutorials: Best Of
• Adobe Photoshop Tutorials: Rainbows, Glows and Light Effects

Although light is considered to be rather a practical than an artistic tool, it has some properties which designers can effectively explore in their works. Indeed, light can also be considered as a medium for more powerful and more vivid artistic expression. In fact, many artists and crews make use of it creating quite impressive works of art.

In this episode of our Monday Inspiration series we present 50 beautiful examples of light art — paintings, sculptures, drawings and graffitts which were created using light. At the bottom of this post you will find references to related Flickr pools which contain thousands of further examples of what can be achieved out of creative experiments with light.

Stylesheets can get large real quickly, both in terms of length and file size. To ensure that your web pages render correctly and quickly, here’s a compilation of some of the best free, web-based CSS optimizers/compressors, code formatters, and validation services. Check them out and pick the ones that work best [...]

Over the past year Google has begun to make moves that take it away from its core search and ad business and into the area of content creation and publication. That didn’t work out so well for Yahoo!, so why is Google trying it?

AideRSS is simply one of the best RSS filtering tools on the market for cutting through the noise and finding the best quality content. Now the company is releasing their PostRank filtering algorithm as a public API.

Remember the “Peanut Butter Manifesto?” That’s the name given to then-Yahoo! SVP Brad Garlinghouse’s November 2006 memo that called on Yahoo! to “boldly and definitively declare what we are and what we are not.” Concerned that the company had lost its “passion to win” and its focus, Garlinghouse pressed his fellow Yahoo! employees [...]

Google announced yesterday evening that it was adding search volume numbers to its AdWords Keyword Tool. The improvement will be helpful for search marketers planning ad buys and for anyone doing market research and checking up on competitors.

Several years ago I was working on a project where the client was looking for a really dramatic imagery effect for his advertising campaign. The campaign focused on several images portraying men at work in very dirty, manual labor. Here is the effect I came up with.