High dynamic range photography merges multiple exposures into one hyper-real image, and with such amazing results it's a wonder that I haven't been exposed to it before today. I'd like to extend a thank you to the guys over at Boing Boing who just linked me into the wonderful world of HDR through this great Flickr pool. I'll spare you the boring details and allow you to read up on it yourself here.

There are some great plugins for Photoshop that helps you achieve the effect, one is Photomatix which is offered as a stand alone program and also a Photoshop CS2 plugin. A free trial is available. For those of us who can't afford to drop more money into plugins, Photoshop CS2 offers 32-bit High Dynamic Range (HDR) support. A decent tutorial is available here. However the results may be a little harder to arrive at, see the Photomatix comparison site for a comparison.

Feel free to experiment and post your image into the Flickr group, link back in the comments so we can check it out!

Surprisingly a recent survey conducted by Novell listed Photoshop as the must have application on Linux followed by a number of other design applications. I never thought of Linux as a media friendly OS but I guess many users are pushing for it to happen. When I first tried using GIMP on my Windows desktop at work it was a nightmare. I found myself increasingly frustrated with having to adjust my work flow to match what the creators of GIMP developed. Then GIMPshop came onto the scene and while it was a vast improvement for the designers weaned on Adobe's offering, I still couldn't get the hang of using it for long projects. It was perfectly fine for cropping or adjusting the colors but I still yearned for Photoshop.

Apparently other designers feel this way, voting for Photoshop as the must have port on the Linux OS. For an insightful look as to why Photoshop users can't live with GIMPshop and the upcoming improvements to GIMP, continue reading at DesktopLinux.com.

Ever feel guilty that you haven't been paying your dues to the mighty Adobe/Macromedia giant, overseer of all tools used by us lowly designers? Neither have I, especially with this nifty hack of Gimp. Called the GIMPshop, it's a cosmetic hack of the GNU image manipulation tool. Upon further inspection, it's not as much of a cosmetic hack as it is a UI hack. You may think those are the same things, but what it really does is reorganize all the menus, basically recreating your Photoshop workflow on Gimp. I've been forced to use Gimp for the last month now at work since they won't spring for an Adobe Creative Suite license, but I'm getting the hang of it and GIMPshop should only make things easier. Cross platform!

In a decade, when all of us will be relegated to our chairs and computers more so than we already are, our physical self will no longer matter. Slowly and surely we'll evolve or devolve (however you see it) into that ugly alien on American Dad. Lots of mental power but nothing there physically. At that point, all the beauty salons will file for bankruptcy, putting away their physical tools for Photoshop lessons.

You can beat them to it. With this simple Photoshop tutorial, you can do wonders with your digital self. But for some of you, maybe you should just swap your photo out for someone else. I'm so mean… I'm kidding of course.

Jan's old stomping grounds, lynda.com, is offering a free 24 hour pass so that you may sample some of the great tutorials available there. Not limited to Photoshop, try your hand at other programs by the soon to be Adobe/Macromedia behemoth, Microsoft, Corel, and Apple.

The release of Adobe's Creative Suite 2, marks 15 years of Photoshop development. Curious as to how the user interface has evolved over the years? Head on over to GUIdebook and take a look at the snapshots of various aspects of the interface. Believe it or not, it looks like Adobe got the GUI right the first time around as users will be familiar with the old interfaces even if they have never used them at all.

Submitted by Mike of Flash Insider, FilmWise is a movie quiz site that shows off some exceptional Photoshop skills. Using stills from films with all human references edited out (hands, skin, faces), you are left with everything else to guess what movie the still is from. I only got the Jay and Silent Bob reference. The rest are pretty hard, guess I'm not that much of a movie buff.

A member of the community over at Core77, yo, has written a concise but informative tutorial on how to transfer a quick product sketch into a loose Photoshop rendering. By his count, the sketch should take about 10 minutes, and the Photoshop work should take about 20 minutes. Half an hour for a relatively nice looking piece, most definitely worth a look! This tutorial might be considered a bit beginner-ish for some of you readers.

If you haven't noticed, Mac Design Magazine is now Layers Magazine. Actually the full name would be Layers, The How-To Magazine for Everything Adobe. With Macromedia out of the game and now part of Adobe, I suppose the magazine has nothing to lose by focusing on product offerings from a single company. The magazine used to cover Final Cut Pro too, but that will strictly appear on the Mac Design website now.

Now that some of us early adopters have had the chance to settle down with Creative Suite 2, it is time to dig deeper into the enhanced functions the fine programmers at Adobe have cooked up for us. One of the many tools introduced is the Vanishing Point filter. If you haven't had a chance to play around with this tool or am curious about the tool take a look at this quick and simple tutorial by Scott Kelby at Layers Magazine.

If you are more of a visual learner, check this free Total Training clip at Photoshop Support. Be sure to check out the plethora of other tutorials at these sites. Have fun!