It’s true - people do judge a book by its cover. Photogrpahy and graphics have a great influence on the buying decisions during shelf-browsing. But how many times have you been disappointed by what goes beyond the attractive first impression? Check the website below to see how accurately you can guess a good book by judging its cover (the application compares your rating with the Amazon rating of the respective book).

Note: “good:” is here rather a measure of marketability (popularity).

How do you make your photos stand out? First, of course, you make sure to choose the right settings for your camera, to compose the frame nicely, and then you touch it up in Photoshop for brightness, exposure, colors, etc. But you could take them a step forward and give your photos some color effects that will make them stand out. For this, you’ll have to explore in some areas you rarely go: the adjustments per channel in Curves dialog, the Gradient Maps, and the Lab mode.

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Start by downloading this picture from sxc.hu. This image is great for the task because it already has a wet floor with puddles, which will make the composition more believable.

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10 beauty retouching don’ts

There are a thousand beauty retouching tutorials out there, but just because someone writes a tutorial, it doesn’t mean that they necessarily teach you something good. I have recently browsed through a list of 40 beauty retouching tutorials in a long article at PSDTuts and I was astonished by the amount of nonsense published there. Now, don’t get me wrong, I love PSDTuts, they have great tutorials, but this particular article was low standard. It’s enough to look to the preview images to see how amateurish the Photoshop effects are.  The good tutorials – I could easily count on one hand.
Therefore I decided to make a list of the most common misconceptions and amateurish techniques in beauty retouching. And their cure. Maybe this will help reduce the amount of plastic face spread all over the internet (and not only).

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Because it’s almost that time, let’s take a look at this collection of election logos of US politicians since 1960 on. Courtesy of logoblink.com