“Part of the romance of travel is the notion that you’re visiting remote, isolated wonders. The trouble is, when you arrive somewhere like Machu Picchu, Angkor Wat or the Pyramids at Giza, you find you’re not alone — the place is crawling with hordes of poorly dressed tourists that muck up your pristine photographs.

We can’t help you get rid of tourists at the actual sites, but we’ll show you how to zap them out of your photos, offering friends and family the illusion that you had the place to yourself.”

See for yourself at Wired’s Wiki.

In addition, we have used blue_shined to make a set of icons specifically for bloggers, using the fanstastic Crystal Icons images and the Glassy Pin Buttons pack. These are shown below

You can download this full, free icon pack here which includes both sets of images, in all the sizes they come. Please feel free to leave any feedback/requests you may have!

Noupe has compiled a list of their top Photoshop extras and we thought we should share it with you

For months, we have been bookmarking interesting, useful and creative Adobe Photoshop tutorials and Resources, so you can now rest assured that you will have the necessary tools to get the job done.

Due to this phenomenally vast amount of textures, brushes, patterns available, you can now add dirt, rust, floral effect, swirls, mold, oil stains in your artworks and photos to give them an aged, damaged, dreamy or any look you want. [read more]

The biggest difference between Phoenix and the other online editors I tried was that Phoenix was created with the serious artist in mind whereas the others seemed to be geared more towards the casual user, the user who needs a quick image crop/photo processing for web.

And in that regard, applications such as Fotoflexer and Picnik, do excel.

Of course, Phoenix still allows for minor image enhancement features and cropping as in the other programs, but the depth of the features in Phoenix and potential to create in-depth composite art puts it in a separate class more akin to desktop software. Aviary’s unparalleled collaboration system, rights management and built-in storage gives the user added incentive to use the program over its desktop predecessors.

I also came across an article stating that 60% of Photoshop users are pirates. That is an insanely high amount of people pirating Adobe’s software. I would think that the majority of users pirating it are using it for basic tasks and hopefully with the release of the online version these figures will come down.

Source: Wikipedia

Adobe today launched a basic version of Adobe Photoshop available for free online. Photoshop Express will be completely Web-based so consumers can use it with any type of computer, operating system and browser. According to Yahoo! News, Adobe says providing Photoshop Express for free is part marketing and part a strategy to create up-sell opportunities. It hopes some customers will move from it to boxed software like its $99 Photoshop Elements or to a subscription-based version of Express that’s in the works.”

“Photoshop actions are the best — they save time and make you more productive during post-processing. They can be used to speed up repetitive tasks, make quick work of time consuming edits, and give you a little creative inspiration. In several of my previous Photoshop articles I’ve given the option to download a set of actions that cover the topics discussed here on the blog.”

Read more at EpicEdits

• Free Photoshop Layers (about.com)
• Free Layer Styles (about.com)
• Ultimate Web 2.0 Layer Styles
• Adobe Photoshop Layer Styles (biorust.com)
• 56 Photoshop Layer Styles