Today I decided to toss out a few links to Photoshop & Illustrator tutorials that I've had bookmarking for a while.

The first is a quicky tutorial on how to colorize a black and white photo. There are certainly more in-depth tutorials, but this one is short, sweet and to the point.

The second tutorial shows you how to create this nifty explosion (the author calls it fireworks, but I don't think it really looks like fireworks).

The tutorial goes into an often underused feature of Photoshop, Variations, that I have used quite frequently over the years. Even if you don't like the effect, you can see what you can do with Variations just by looking at the screenshot.

The third tutorial shows you how to create a professional “portrait-style background” for those clipped out stock photo images. This tutorial is a flash-based video tutorial.

And finally, a simple tutorial to show you how to rotate individual letters in a text object in Adobe Illustrator.