Last month, I moved from the green and cloudy Portland, Oregon, to Phoenix, Arizona, the Valley of the Sun. The transition inspired me to devote two installments of Free For All to contrasting collections of environment-inspired textures, photos, Photoshop Actions, and other freebies.

Last month I focused on the beauty of the American Northwest. In this installment, the free resources celebrate the American Southwest.

These resources are only inspired by the regions; they'll almost certainly prove useful additions to your resource libraries for a variety of projects, whether related to the region or not.

Note that page 1 has free photographs, textures, color palettes, and patterns. For free Photoshop Actions and Photoshop brushes, go to page 2.

Photography and Textures
I've collected 120 free stock photos and textures into two Stock.Xchng lightboxes: FFA Southwest 1 and FFA Southwest 2. The images, which range from textures to people, nature to manmade structures, and even a few odds and ends that are unique to the American Southwest, represent life in the lower-left corner of the United States dominated by Phoenix, Death Valley, the Grand Canyon, and Utah.

Note: You need a free membership to Stock.Xchng to download the images in these lightboxes.

FFA Southwest Lightbox 1 (60 images)

FFA Southwest Lightbox 2 (60 images)

Palettes and Patterns
Every climate and geographic region can be expressed in terms of color and pattern. Below are color palettes that say "Southwest," for your inspiration and import into Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Fireworks, Painter, and other creative professional applications.

Click any of the images to go to their download page. You'll need a free membership to either ColourLovers or Kuler to download the palettes.

For free Photoshop Actions and Photoshop brushes, go to page 2.

Return to page 1 of this article.

Photoshop Actions
With the legendary brightness and daytime warmth in the Mojave, Sonoran, Great Basin, and Red deserts, warm lighting, high dynamic range, and potential overexposure characterize outdoor photography in the Southwest. The following actions help you replicate those characteristics no matter where you shoot the photo. Add even more authenticity to your photos and designs with scratchy and cracked actions--perhaps the result of abrasive sands hurled by the desert winds.

Photoshop Brushes
Hot and arid, sandy and rocky, the American Southwest evokes images of dusty cowboys, wide-open desert plains, cacti, and rough-hewn minerals in every form and fashion. Due to the high temperatures and lack of humidity, the area is equated with the element fire as much as its terrains are associated with the element Earth. Use the following brushes to evoke dirt, sand, stone, flames, sunbursts, and water-starved riverbeds.

What can I find free for you? Want more free fonts? More Photoshop brushes? How about more online applications that do this or that for free? Tell me in the comments what you'd like to see in future installments of Free for All, and I'll do my best bloodhound impression to track it down for you.

Please note: Free for All will often link to resources hosted on external Web sites outside of the control of CreativePro.com. At any time those Web sites may close down, change their site or permalink structures, remove content, or take other actions that may render one or more of the above links invalid. As such neither Pariah S. Burke nor CreativePro.com can guarantee the availability of the third-party resources linked to in Free for All.