Many of you Photoshoppers likely know about this already, but many perhaps do not–I did not, until many years into playing around with the premier photo-editing program. It’s already fun to play with just as it is, but a lot of people have put a lot of work into creating special effects which you can enjoy for free. Just go to Adobe’s home page and head over the the Adobe Studio Exchange. There are tons of freeware effects for a variety of Adobe software; below are some examples of “styles” for Photoshop I’ve been sampling. Some very cool stuff there. Again, it’s free, but you have to register before you can download anything–but once you get started, it’s hard to stop!

FYI, after you download a style resource (with the filename extension “.asl”), to install it, you first open Photoshop, bring up the “Styles” palette, click on the arrow menu in the upper right corner of the palette, and choose “Load Styles…”. Then navigate to the .asl file you downloaded, and click “Load.” The new style(s) in that package will appear at the bottom of the styles list. You can apply a style to an object in a layer above the background layer (such as a shape, filled outline, or text). Just select the target layer and then click on the desired style. If you want to get rid of a style you don’t like, then just right-click (or control-click for one-button-mouse Mac users) on the style button and choose “delete style.” The above sampler shows a different style for each letter.

My apologies for not getting the Fahrenheit 9/11 review up yet; that will (hopefully) be up by tomorrow sometime. This semester, Tuesday through Thursday is where my work is concentrated, and I have the least free time.