FYI, there really are racing camels! Camel racing is pretty popular among the locals here in Saudi Arabia. Gromit Dhahran, Saudi Arabia

UV Mapper is simple enough as long as all the faces of an object will map in some way to primitives like a cube or cylinder. I haven't worked out how you define regions that must be mapped separately, when the faces can't all be seen from the x, y, or z directions or when they are hidden by other faces. I'd like to go to that link above, but unfortunately our firewall has that domain blocked along with many others. Gromit Dhahran, Saudi Arabia

Had the exact same problem with the auto-updater, but the manual update is easy, just a big (8mb) download. Gromit Dhahran, Saudi Arabia

You probably already know this too, but you can do some tricks like this with the History Brush too. One way would be to blur the entire picture until you have the amount of blur you want in the areas you want it, then go to the History palette and click the previous state to return the picture to an un-blurred condition. Then click the check box next to the line in the palette for the blurred state to set it as the source for the History Brush. Set the opacity settings to a fairly high number and brush in the blurred state wherever you want it. I do this kind of thing all the time to remove posterization in pictures I'm trying to enhance. Gromit

In that same vein, you can create a new layer duplicating the original picture, then set the new layer's properties to Multiply. Fiddle with the opacity to get the best looking image. This can very quickly fix washed-out or undersaturated images, I use it for photos a lot. Gromit

The little finger and ring finger on the left hand look awfully stiff. Trying to duplicate that pose with my own hand, it's a really unnatural pose, but makes sense if the hand is stretching around in an effort to reach the sleave of the other arm like that. I think, in that case, the fingertips of those two fingers would have some backward bend from being pressed hard against the paper. Interesting problem, I think I understand that your intent is to create an Escher-type effect, in which case what you really want is a dimensional transition, 2D to 3D, that confuses the eye. I've never tried anything like that, but my guess is that you need to carry the 2D pencil outline of the arm up to the bend of the wrist, gradually transitioning the shading from a light pencil shading near the edge of the sleeve cuff, showing the paper grain, to a full skin texture at the wrist. I think your shadows ought to trasition from an obvious paper grain to realistic shadows where you want the image to appear 3D. This will be quite a trick to pull off, and my hat's off to you if you can manage it! Gromit

Regarding selective blurring with the history brush, you can do the same thing with sharpening. Over-sharpen the image, move back one step in the history palette, then use the sharpened state as the source for the history brush. It often helps to sharpen certain definite boundaries in faces, particularly eyes, mouth, nose, eyebrows. Just be sure to use a low opacity setting on the tool so you make changes gradually. It's like a woman putting on makeup, you want to cover certain areas and enhance others. And speaking of sharpening, another procedure I do a lot is to convert the image to LAB color before I sharpen. Then I only do the sharpening on the Lightness channel. In LAB, The Lightness channel is a gray-scale channel that contains only the image detail, no color information. The A and B channels contain only color info. One of the problems with sharpening in color images is that artifacts will "bloom" as you sharpen, i.e. you'll see glowing pixels suddenly jump out at some point. If you sharpen only on the Lightness channel in LAB, this doesn't happen and you can sharpen more than you normally could in RGB or CMYK. You can also work some wonders on really bad posterized images by heavily blurring on the A and B channels in LAB. Since the detail is all on the Lightness channel, you won't blur the image boundaries, only the color. If you need to, you can apply a smaller amount of blur to the Lightness channel, then selectively sharpen certain areas with the history brush. It is an art, no doubt about it, and it takes some practice. For a bad example of this stuff, look at http://www.crfranklin.com/photo.2.gif for a real crappy "before" pic and http://www.crfranklin.com/photo.3.jpg for a less crappy "after" pic. Again, not a good pic in any case. Gromit

First of all, I used to try using the lasso tool or other selection tools to cut out an object precisely. I quit doing that, because I found it is much easier and more flexible to do the following: Cut out the image roughly with the lasso or other selection tool; Invert the selection and delete everything else on the layer; Add a layer mask, setting it to Reveal All; Using the painting tools, paint on the layer mask with black to mask out the areas you want to delete, paint with white to un-mask any areas where you went too far. When you've got it like you want it, you can remove the layer mask and accept the changes. I use the history brush a lot for retouching and restoring photos. If you want to make someone look younger, for example, do the following: Do a heavy Gaussian blur on the image, more than it takes to blur out any wrinkles. In the history palette, click on the state BEFORE you applied the blur. The blur will disappear. In the history palette, click in the little window just to the left of the "Gaussian blur" state. This will make the blur the source for the history brush. Click on the history brush in the Tools Palette. Set the opacity to a low value, about 15% or even less. You can always set it higher if you need to later. Select a soft-edged brush that's appropriate to the size of the areas you want to work in, i.e. wrinkles around the eyes, nose and mouth. Paint in the wrinkled areas. This will gradually blur out the wrinkles and smooth them in to the rest of the face. Gromit

Change is always a little frightening, even for me. I think most of us feel that our comfort level is threatened, some of us absolutely rebel against it, even if that means tacit rejection. Those are generally the same folks who you always hear saying "We've always done it this way" when you suggest something new and different. Gromit

LOTS of keyboard shortcuts. I certainly don't use them all, but the ones I do use often enough to remember them are: Ctrl-A: Select All Ctrl-D: Deselect Ctrl-E: Merge down (Merges current layer with one below)Ctrl-H: Hide selection border Ctrl-L: Adjust Levels and of course: Crtl-C: Copy to clipboard Ctrl-X: Cut to clipboard Ctrl-V: Paste to a new layer Page Up and Page Down: Scroll the view up or down 1 page Shift-Page Up and Shift-Page Down: Scroll up or down 10 pixels. Ctrl-Click on a layer thumbnail in the Layers Palette selects all non-transparent pixels on the layer. There are many, many more, I just don't ordinarily use them. If you copy a selection to the clipboard, then create a new file, the default file size and resolution will be that of the copied selection, so the selection will paste into it exactly. Gromit

I've been using it since version 3.0. I am a computer guy and I never hang on to old versions of anything when a newer version comes out. I never noticed much of a change in the tools or workings of Photoshop at all from one version to another, only the addition of more functionality. It's hard for me to imagine that anyone would hang on to version 4 when they could have features like the History Palette and brush, extremely valuable for photo restorations and touch-ups. Gromit

I think the Adobe "Classroom in a Book" series is excellent. I used the Basic and Advanced books to learn Photoshop originally, then moved on to other books. I have a LOT of them I've bought over the past few years but I'm a real book freak anyway. Some of them are truly great, some have their great parts. I'll try to sit down this evening and write down the titles of the ones I've found valuable and would recommend, for what it's worth. Gromit

Well, strictly speaking, Photoshop doesn't do renderings, at least not from 3D to 2D. However, if you have enough RAM to work with your images without having to page out to the hard disk, many operations will be faster, sometimes a lot faster if your hard disk is relatively slow. Processor speed will affect it, of course. Photoshop is a multi-threaded application, so it will take advantage of multiple processors. Not all applications will be affected by multiple processors unless they're designed to do so. Now having said that, you can configure Photoshop to use as much or as little of your RAM as you want it to. Gromit

It really, really is! It will use all the RAM you can give it, of course depending on the image sizes you're working with. It also needs a swap file about three times the size of the largest image you want to work with. If it ever crashes, you'd better be sure to look for that temp file and delete it, because it can take a CHUNK of your hard disk space and it will stay there forever if you don't manually remove it. I have an Intergraph workstation and it's old now, but I got it so I could work with images. As prices on things came down, I added more RAM, a second processor, a 9Gb Ultra-SCSI HD, etc., and Photoshop uses whatever you give it. Some of the people at our company are using it for aerial photo work, files 1Gb in size. They have workstations with 2Gb RAM, 4 processors, and their own RAID array. Gromit

If you're compositing renders made against a black or white background into a background image, you may find that it adds to the photorealism if you use Layers, Matting, Remove Black Matte or Remove White Matte. This will clip off the remaining background pixels from your figure. The other thing I do when I want to add shadows is to copy the layer the figure is on, fill the copy with black, move it so the layer is below the figure's layer, use the transform tools to distort it so it looks like it's on the ground plane or whatever, do a Gaussian blur to soften it, reduce the opacity to around 50% or whatever looks good, and it makes a pretty good shadow as long as the light is coming from behind the viewer, so the shadow extends into the picture. If I need a shadow to be in a different direction, I usually do a separate render from a camera position pointing from the direction of the light source. Then I do the same operation, filling it with black, etc. to create a shadow that appears to be geometrically correct. Gromit