Nice set of 25 acrylic brushes by theshoreways.com you can use to fill out your canvas in Photoshop.
Click here to download the brushes.

“Designed to provide you with a streamlined workflow, these presets for Adobe Photoshop Lightroom were designed by Photoshop Guru Jack Davis to help you get the most out of Lightroom. Organized and setup in a traditional workflow, these presets will help you quickly set the correct white balance, choose a tone curve, adjust vibrance, HSL, convert to black and white and add a vignette.”

If you aren’t using Lightroom to manage and edit your photos, you are missing out!
Personally I couldn’t live without Lightroom, and all the presets available just make this app a brilliant tool to manage and edit your photos. With that said, here are some excellent Lightroom resources:

Download a 30 day trial of Lightroom 2.0 at Adobe.com

- 85 presets to simplify and speed up your Lightroom
- Tips, videos and presets at LightroomKillerTips.com
- Great selection of presets at LightroomPresets.com
- Lightroom presets and videos at Seim Effects
- Huge selection of presets at Inside-Lightroom.com
- Lightroom Video Tutorials by Michael Tapes

What is a preset? (In case you didn’t know)
Presets allow you to add pre-defined effects and settings to images with a single click, or even apply them to hundreds of images (batch edit). This is priceless when it comes to the photographers creative workflow. Also this type of workflow is non destructive to the photo, meaning that you can make edits, and reset them to original at any time. Your changes are stored as a separate file, and are not locked to an image until you export a new file with those settings applied.

“Ornamental web design is often comprised of swirling, curling, or flower shaped elements. This style is influenced from decorative art pieces and architectural accents from centuries ago. Using ornamental style is a great way to give your site a classic look. Here is a list of Photoshop brushes that should help you out with your next ornamental design.”

I’m a big fan of brushes and vectors, and when I saw this collection at designreviver.com I just had to post it.

Click here to view the collection.

“Desktop wallpapers can serve as an excellent source of inspiration. However, if you use some specific wallpaper for a long period of time, it becomes harder to draw inspiration out of it. That’s why we have decided to supply you with smashing wallpapers over 12 months.”

SmashingMagazine.com has featured a handful of wallpapers for July 2008. Some really nice looking ones in there too! (I’m currently using the one above at work, while I dream of going on a vacation…)

HDR was originally developed for use with purely computer-generated images. Later, methods were developed to produce a high dynamic range image from a set of photographs taken with a range of exposures. HDR is now popularly used to refer to the process of tone mapping together with bracketed exposures of normal digital images, giving the end result a high, often exaggerated dynamic range.

“Tone mapping is a technique used in image processing and computer graphics to map a set of colours to another; often to approximate the appearance of high dynamic range images in media with a more limited dynamic range.”

More info about HDR imaging at Wikipedia.

Examples

HDR images can be quite stunning as you can see by the examples below.

• 35 fantastic HRD images showcased by Smashing Magazine.
• 20 beautiful HRD images showcased by Abduzeedo.com
• HDR Creme has a great HDR images gallery where users can view, share and rate.
• Flikr.com “best of HDR photos” pool.

Tutorials

Adobe Photoshop CS2 & CS3 include the “merge to HDR” feature, that allows the photographer to combine a series of bracketed exposures into a single image which encompasses the tonal detail of the entire series.

• Cambridgeincolour.com has written a detailed example on how to create HDR images from your photos, and can be viewed here.
• Revver.com has a nice video tutorial on how to create HDR images with Photoshop CS3.
• HDR tutorial roundup put together by Tutorialblog.org
• How to create ‘High Dynamic Range’ images using Photomatix by Vanilla Days.
• Click here for a long list of HDR videos from Youtube.com
• If you need free photos to experiment with, visit our stock photo gallery.

HDR Software

Photomatix
Increase the dynamic range of your photographs with this stand-alone program.