Photoshop Brushes are an easy way to spice up your designs. Grab them, place them and you’re done.

Fudgegraphics has a collection of sticky tape brushes and textures to enhance your latest Photoshop design.

The Brush collection is a single, 25.3MB file, containing 15 brushes averaging over 2,000 pixels in size.

The Texture collection is a 39MB ZIP file containing 15 PNG files of the same images as the brush set.

You can download Sticky Tape absolutely free from Fudgegraphics.

Enlarging photos appears to be a simple and mundane task for the average user. But as a pro, you understand the ramifications of firing up Photoshop and just using the Image Size dialog box, or worse yet, just stretching an image in your page layout application.

Blow Up 2, from Alien Skin Software, is a Photoshop plugin that produces high-quality image enlargements by using an algorithm which temporarily converts pixels in your photo to vectors. The results are a sharper, more detailed enlargement.

Read my full review of Blow Up 2 at Macworld. Blow Up 2 isn't for everyone, but if you do a lot of image enlargements from low resolution or small high resolution images, Alien Skin has a pretty good solution with Blow Up.

When you have a multi-layered Photoshop document and for whatever reason you want to save each layer as a separate document, it's quite easy to do - and requires no tedious cut & paste commands.

Go to File>Scripts>Export Layers to Files. When the dialog box appears, you'll have several options available including where you want to save the files, and a file name prefix. You can also choose from a number of file formats to save the document as, including JPG, PSD, PDF, TIF and more. Each format offers a few options as well.

Macworld recently published my review of Alien Skin Software's Bokeh plugin for Adobe Photoshop, Fireworks and Elements.

Part 1 of the review can be found here, and covers the bokeh effect to emphasize your subject by adding blur to the background and adjusting the highlights of your image.

Part 2 of the article can be found here, and covers the ability to use the Bokeh plugin to simulate tilt-shift photography, which effectively allows you to turn your image into a miniature model as seen in the image above.

If you don't have the budget for expensive tilt-shift and bokeh lenses, this plugin might be just what the digital doctor ordered to enhance your images.

If you're a long-time Mac user and don't care for Adobe Photoshop CS4's new Tabbed document interface, you can revert back to the old-style single image windows by going to Photoshop>Preferences>Interface and unchecking the Open Documents as Tabs button in the Panels & Document section.

I just came across a really nice brush set over at BrushKing this morning. Halftone3 is a pack of 11 Photoshop brushes by DeviantArt member, env1ro.

Guides can be really helpful when composing your artwork in Photoshop. Many users often find themselves tediously trying to place a guide at the exact center of a Photoshop document by dragging the guide out of the ruler. Even holding the Shift key down to have the guides snap to the tick marks on the ruler, it can be a pain. There's an easier way to do it.

Go to View>New Guide and choose either a horizontal or vertical Orientation by checking the radio buttons. Then type 50% in the position box. Repeat the process for the other Orientation. You'll now have guides at the exact horizontal and vertical in your document.

Now that you've created your guides, you want them to stay centered. But if your guides are locked into place and you crop or otherwise resize your image, the guides remain wherever they are, including off the image completely depending on where they are located. To have them remain at the 50% mark no matter how you crop or resize, simply unlock your guides by hitting Command + Option + ; (or visit the View menu and unlock them manually).

Alternatively, if you really want the guides to stay in place, lock the guides before your crop or resize. So that vertical guide you placed at the one inch mark will remain there after you resize your image (unless of course you resize your image to smaller than one inch).

Rather than searching far and wide for the right background texture for your next creative project, considering using Photoshop brushes to create your own.

DESIGNM.AG has put together a list of 500+ Photoshop brushes for creating textures that make it easy.

If you frequently find yourself adjusting the blend mode of layers in your Photoshop document, you can save yourself some time and mouse scrolling by using keyboard shortcuts instead. With the layer you want to adjust selected, cycle through blend modes by hitting Shift + (plus) or Shift - (minus) to drill down through the list and have the mode applied to your layer. If you frequently use Multiply as a blend mode, you can set it by hitting Shift + Option + M. Or Shift + Option + C for Color mode.

Everyone knows you can move an object in Adobe Photoshop, InDesign or Illustrator by selecting it and hitting one of the arrow keys. This typically results in the object moving one point at a time. But if you hold down the Shift key while hitting the arrow keys, the object will move by 10 points. Not a huge time saver, but every little bit helps.