Lunacore offers a unique, detailed tutorial that shows how to create an animated airplane flying through clouds. The tutorial uses layer masks in a sophisticated way to create the illusion that of depth--a technique can be used with still images, as well as animations. To top it off, there's even a contrail that follows the plane on its journey.

I'm a fan of creating web page mockups in Photoshop before creating the actual pages in a site-building program. Photoshop Lab offers some useful tips for mocking up a web page in Photoshop. The post includes instructions for creating design elements in Photoshop like dotted and dashed underlines. It shows how to clip Color Fill layers to content layers to color individual elements on a page mockup. And it offers a technique for creating an image placeholder using clipping groups.

Jennifer Apple over at The Photoshop Blog posted a great tip for getting that perfect selection when you're having a tough time with other methods, possibly due to backgrounds or surrounding elements that are stumping Photoshop and its various selection tools.

Jennifer's idea is to give your selection tool of choice a helping hand by using a Levels or Curves adjustment layer (Layer > New Adjustment Layer) to increase the image's contrast. Using an adjustment layer (instead of applying the changes directly) will allow you to preserve the image the way you want it, make the selection you need and then throw out or turn off (for later use) the layer in order to go on about your business.

This method is both a great technique and a prime example of the power of adjustment layers that should be incorporated into nearly every Photoshop user's toolbelt as soon as possible.

This might seem like a basic tip to some, but I've been meeting more and more Photoshoppers from all walks of life who are so delighted to find out about this tip that I thought I'd post it.

Using the Measure Tool (oddly hidden under the Eyedropper Tool) in CS2 and CS, as well as 7 and I think 6 and earlier, you can draw a straight line and use it to orient your comp. For example: say you need to rotate an image ever so slightly so the side of a building is perfectly vertical or the edge of a table exactly horizontal. Simply draw a line with the Measure Tool along whatever object, edge or item you would like to straighten out with, then go up to Image > Rotate Canvas > Arbitrary. The Angle field will already be filled in with the value needed to straighten out the line you drew, in which case your canvas will rotate by that amount.

See? No more 'rotating and guessing.'

John Nack has linked to a few tutorials that will teach you how to tweak Photoshop for a better output to the web and Flash. One set of video-based tutorials in Adobe's Motion Design Center (which I recommend checking out if, like me, you're into motion) covers the topic of color - and how to maintain it - when moving an image from Photoshop CS2 into Flash 8. Another set of Photoshop Flash tutorials John links to hail from Michael Ninness, a friend of John's, and they cover quite the gamut of go-between topics including PSDs, JPEGs, Flash's bitmap features and pre-import optimization tips.

With so many tutorials lined up, you have your work cut out for you. Go forth and learn the mighty ways of the Photoshop and Flash Color Ninja™.