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From SmashingMagazine: Beauty retouching is probably one of the most popular application areas in which Adobe Photoshop is used extensively. There are two simple reasons for that. First, Photoshop offers a variety of advanced tools to smooth out skin and hair, optimize body proportions and emphasize some beautiful details. And second, if you have some experience with Photoshop it is easy to learn the basics and quickly produce very impressive and beautiful results.

Of course, beauty-retouching is a quite deceptive art. The masters of Photoshop create illusions which are hard to tell apart — unless you have both a genuine photo and the final result in Photoshop and can directly compare them. In fact, every day we consume perfectly retouched stars and models online and offline which just look different in the real life.

Still, it is not the reason to avoid learning advanced Photoshop techniques for beauty-retouching and study examples of how it is done in practice. The list at their site presents both image-tutorials as well as video-tutorials. Most examples have a before-vs.-after-comparison and you can follow the modifications with Photoshop step-by-step.

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One of these is a photograph taken by the Hubble space telescope on December 17, 2002, featuring the variable star V838 Monocerotis. The other is the same photograph overlaid with a familiar logo. Can you tell which is which?

Below is another photo of the same star, from the Wikipedia entry on V838 Monocerotis. If the above photo has been photoshopped to look more like the Firefox logo, the editing seems minimal: it’s been rotated relative to the photo below, and some of the gas cloud may have been edited out around the “tail” of the fox.

An eagle-eyed viewr, spotted the original version of the Firefox-like nova photo on Wikipedia. It looks like the only modification was to rotate the image. It must be a sign from the stars!

Lego master Mark Kelso has just recently put the last brick on his model of the Invisible Hand, General Grevious’ ship from Star Wars Episode III.

Yes, that photo of him and his model is to scale—it’s frickin’ massive! This sucker took him 9 months to build, it’s 231 studs long (73 inches to ya non-Lego-geeks), 41 studs wide and weights around 30 pounds! This things looks like it’s straight from one of the StarWars sets. Click through to see more screenshots!

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Holy crap, this is a hidden gem. With the massive size of hard drives nowadays you’re bound to lose some stuff and end up relying on Windows search to find it. But what if you run a certain search often, wouldn’t it be handy if you could SAVE a previous search? You can in Vista, it’s called Virtual Folders. Press the Orb (previously called the start button) and click search in the right hand of the popup. Alternatively, just hit Windows-F.

After you’ve refined your search (be sure to check out the Advanced Search drop down) and gotten the results you want hit the Save Search icon in the middle of the search screen. Assign it a name and any tags you want to associate with it (I found the tags useful for photo’s). Once saved a new Virtual Folder appears in your Searches folder and you can use it any time you want. What’s most slick about this is that they virtual folder gets updated on the fly! So any files that get changed, added or removed are updated in the search automagically!