Photoshop CS5 introduced the Puppet Warp tool. This useful new tool lets you set "pins" that act like joints. Moving one pin moves the pixels around it in relation to the other placed pins -- imagine lifting the hand of a marionette with a string attached to the hand at one end and a bar at the other.

While clever people are exploring Puppet Warp's effect on photos, few are using it on text. With Puppet Warp, you can take letters and entire words in amazing new directions.

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Why should we limit the fun in Adobe Photoshop to the digital world? You can combine old-school art with digital darkroom techniques to create Photoshop brushes for painting and masking. By painting on actual paper first, you'll create original Photoshop brushes that look more authentic than purely digital art. Then you'll vary size, angle, and hue of the brushes in Photoshop, and use them for painting and for masking parts of existing artwork.

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The makers of the Fanta soft drink are running a multi-part ad campaign that uses an interesting effect that's very easy to achieve:

Some projects call for black-and-white photos; others work better with color images. But for certain projects, nothing can beat a black-and-white photo that you custom colorize.

In this tutorial, you'll learn two helpful techniques for adding hues to grayscale photos using Adobe Photoshop. One technique works well when you're adding a uniform color across an area, while the second, more subtle, method lets you paint varying color within the same area. Both approaches preserve the texture of the original photo, creating a realistic color photo from a black-and-white original.

In my article "Add Energy and Interest with Layered Images," I showed you how to mimic the look of online advertisements for the SoCo Music Experience, a music festival sponsored by Southern Comfort. In this tutorial, we'll tackle another real-world example: promotional materials for the Beatles Rock Band game. Using Adobe Illustrator, you'll learn how to create a similar design with a comparable color scheme.

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You can't always work with perfect photos. But with a few ingenious Photoshop techniques, you can turn so-so into something really special. In this tutorial, you'll learn how to add effects to a mediocre snapshot and combine it with a free public-domain photo. The end result is a design that boasts a rugged Western style.

Download the support file folder, called "Old_West_support_files_CreativePro.zip", then uncompress the folder. It contains two JPG files.

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You can enhance one image by dividing it into separate "photos" and then joining the individual pictures into a collage that resembles a pile of prints:

Here's how to create the look in Adobe Photoshop.

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Identify a photo with a lot of interest points. I chose one from iStockPhoto.com.

©ISTOCKPHOTO/RENEE LEE

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Using Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Photoshop together to create masked patterns takes a little time but no money, and with this tutorial, you'll quickly learn all you need to know to take your images beyond the same-old same-old.