Recently, I needed a photo of my friend Steve Laskevitch’s new book to illustrate a tip. The problem, his book doesn’t ship until the end of February.

That’s where a remarkable set of scripts from Photoshop trainer Mark Monciardini saves the day. Mark has designed Cover Action Pro, a collection of specialized Photoshop Actions that magically turn your flat artwork into book covers, software boxes, dvd cases, magazines, and other images perfectly suited for e-commerce sites. The full collection of Photoshop Actions costs $127.

Read on to download two free Photoshop Actions from this collection.

As someone who writes lots of tips about the Mac, I spend plenty of time working with screen captures. A new $15 screen capture utility named Layers is going to save people like me a lot of time each week.

What does it do? Simple. Layers captures your screen as a layered Photoshop PSD file. All windows, menubars, and (in some cases) icons are isolated on individual layers. Even better, it creates layer groups like “Main Menu”, “Dock”, or “Desktop” to group related elements together.

Layers — Capture your screen as a layered Photoshop document.

In the image above, I took a single screen capture of my Mac using Layers. Then I created a quick animation showing how different elements can be turned on and off, showing what is below or above them.

The keywording of images is both a laborious task, while you’re doing it, and one that will save you tons of time later when you search for images. That’s our way of saying, “take your medicine and do your keywording.”

Here is a quick tutorial walking you through creating and importing a text file of keywords into Adobe Bridge CS3 and CS4. We also have a second tutorial for Importing Keywords into Adobe Lightroom 2.

The keywording of images is both a laborious task, while you’re doing it, and one that will save you tons of time later when you search for images. That’s our way of saying, “take your medicine and do your keywording.”

Here is a quick tutorial walking you through creating and importing a text file of keywords into Adobe Lightroom 2. We also have a second tutorial for Importing Keywords into Adobe Bridge.