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Normally, I write these Photoshop Top 40 posts from my home or office in Boulder, Colorado. But this week finds me in the pastoral countryside of Côte du Rhone, France, enjoying a little time off. Alas, the nature of a weekly podcast is that, even on a break, I have to give it the gas.

So I hope you'll forgive me if I keep this post short:

After sixteen Photoshop Top 40 movies, you may wonder what's next. While now you needn't, because here it is.

See? That was short. Read more » 

Most of Photoshop’s top features are expressed as tools or commands. But some are more conceptual, meaning that they have almost no interface associated with them. Seriously, it goes from your mind to your hands to the mouse to the keyboard to Photoshop.

Selection calculations are a fantastic example. Want to make a new selection? Just drag. Add to an existing selection? Press the Shift key and drag. And that, my friends, is only the beginning. Read more » 

If you know anything about Photoshop's brush tool, you know it paints smooth lines in the foreground color. You can control its behavior to the nth degree from the options bar and Brushes palette. And it responds to pressure-sensitive input.

Those attributes alone would earn it a place in the coveted Photoshop Top 40. The fact that it also excels as a masking tool merely cements the deal. Read more » 

If you're anything like me, you just finished celebrating Labor Day by not laboring in the least. Happily, the same cannot be said of Photoshop Top 40. Tuesday after Tuesday, this proud and relentless podcast marches on.

Fittingly, today marks Feature #32, The Pen Tool, one of the most powerful but labor-intensive tools in all of Photoshop. Newbies select images with the likes of the quick select and magic wand tools. Both are highly automated, but they rarely work. Experts use the pen tool. It takes some work to master, but it always works in return. In other words, learn to use the pen tool and you'll be prepared for any masking job. Read more » 

As friends of this site know, Tuesday is Photoshop Top 40 day. And this Tuesday is no exception. Today's video covers one of the oldest, most abstruse, downright incomprehensible commands in all of Photoshop: Calculations. Found under the Image menu, the Calculations command lets you mix two existing channels in an image--say, Red and Blue--to create a new alpha channel that will serve as the basis for a mask. And while it takes a fair amount of time and effort to come to terms with the feature, Calculations is one of the most powerful masking commands in all of Photoshop. Read more »