Photoshopsupport.com is featuring stockvault.net in their Photoshop blog today. The feature includes a short interview with me and some facts about Stockvault. I would like to thank Eric and the rest of the staff at photoshopsupport for this excellent feature of stockvault.net

In other news, a few new images of clouds and skies have been added to the gallery. Click here to view the newest images.

Todays Linkroll:
- Photoshopsupport.com
- Photosharingforum.com
- DigitalPoint Forums
- LowOpacity.net

The site suffered a downtime of around 15 hours yesterday because of a lightning storm that took out the server stockvault and lowopacity are hosted on. Our hosting provider assured me that no equipment was harmed during the storm, but they had some unexpected problems while restoring their services. Let’s hope this doesn’t happen again in the future.

In other news, Trevor Henry has submitted more images to the free gallery.
Click here to view his images.

I just wanted to share with you that the gallery has received over 1 million views and over 300.000 image downloads since it’s beginning in 2004. That’s pretty impressive since we only have around 3.400 images in the gallery.

I also added a nifty feature to the resource section where you can add a premade watermark to your images if you need to protect your work. It’s very handy if you need to post a mockup and don’t have time to start up Photoshop to add a watermark yourself. (this feature is no longer available)

The new navigation and header are now online and seem to work fine in both Firefox and IE. The main navigation has been reduced to 7 menus, and sections such as tutorials, articles and web templates have been moved under the Resources section. I will be focusing on the new resource section in the coming days and weeks, to add new content and smooth out the rough edges. The gallery hasn’t been updated in a while, but Im planning on doing some outside and inside shots very soon.

Feel free to post your opinion on the new navigation & header

Fine tuning and minor modifications are one of the things I spend most of my free time at. I recently introduced affiliate banner and pop-up advertising at stockvault, as a trial, and I was pretty curious on how they would perform on the site. Well, they didn’t perform well and I’ve decided to drop them. Most of the banner ads are already gone, and I will be removing the pop-ups very soon. The footer ads have also been removed, I never liked them personally so we’re all better off without them. And the last thing I want to do is to fill the site up with flashing banner ads.
Enough about that…

Im currently sketching up a new navigation for the site. The current one has become a bit confusing and there are some things that I want to simplify for the new users that visit the site every day. So you might encounter some weird errors because of testing in the coming days. Dont worry, it will make things easier for us all in the long run.

In this tutorial I’m going to show you step by step how to make a realistic burning effect on human skin. This tutorial features layer masking techniques, plus a few tips on color correction and tuning.
Some knowledge of basic tools such as brushes, layer masks and layer modes is needed as I won’t go into detail on how these tools work…

Click here to view the tutorial

I’ve been trying to reach out to the users of myspace.com for a while now, but still havent seen any particular interest from this huge user group towards stockvault.net

Please share your views, do you think that I should move into that direction with stockvault.net?

As the dark artist I am, or used to be – Im always looking for new photoshop tutorial subjects I can write about. I’ve searched the net for a proper tutorial on how to illustrate a burning flesh effect, but always came up empty handed. The good news is that im working on a new tutorial based on the title above. I’ve experimented with this effect a few times already, and have a nice and simple method that im planning on sharing with you. You are probably thinking, “this style is sooo old!” But I think otherwise… Im sure there are alot of beginners and semi advanced designers who are interested in the subject. Anyways, check back later to find the new tutorial on how to make burning flesh.