Crossposted at TimMerritt.net

This MacUpdate Promotion offers Xtralean’s ImageWell for $10, half its regular price. It’s well worth it – it’s great for screen grabs and annotations, allows dragging and dropping of multiple images for quick composites, it has great text tools, and built-in FTP and (for me, the beauty feature) SFTP as well. You can even drag and drop any other kind of file on the “Send” button to quickly upload to one of your stored server locations. Supports PNG format with transparency… an incredible set of features, and I paid full price for it years ago. I have rarely recommended software more highly, and at $10 it’s a real bargain.

I’m looking for a good batch file renamer for my photo workflow, and bingo here’s a how-to for Automator from the auuthoritative folks at Peachpit Publishing. They publish terrific instructional books on all kinds of applications.

Via Peachpit’s Automator for Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, Working with Actions Locating Actions to Do What You Want

I didn’t know Paintbrush existed. From the site:

Paintbrush can open and save to most major image formats, including BMP, PNG, JPEG, TIFF, and GIF. Full support for transparency is available for image formats which support an alpha channel (currently PNGs and GIFs). You can also paste images copied from many common Mac applications, including Microsoft Office and Apple iWork.

Ben Long explains histograms and how to correct color problems in iPhoto. Good screengrabs and explanations.

20 Photoshop Tips & Tricks That You Should Know About from Make Use Of, worth a quick post. The brush-resizing shortcut trick – [ and ] (corner brackets) will decrease or increase the brush size; add shift to change brush hardness – alone is worth following the link.

The fine community at Macintouch points to the Mac-specific area on Old Version Downloads – OldApps.com. Find old versions of lots of software, for Mac and PC: older email programs, audio editors, picture editors, FTP programs, and more. They even have older versions of Apple’s QuickTime. Looks like a great resource, especially if you’re spiffing up an older machine to save money.

And teachers always want to save money.

Could this possibly be enough? Probably not….

Ok, here you go! Over 320 free Photoshop tutorials, professional Photoshop Training clips, Photoshop Techniques, Photoshop Downloads, Photoshop Elements Tutorials and Photoshop for Photographers Training and Tutorials! And all free!

I used to use iMovie much more often; now I do almost all my video editing in Final Cut Pro. Many in the college either use our small Mac lab for video and DVD creation or have their own Macs now. The new iLife, which incorporates iMovie, iDVD, iPhoto, and more, has achieved hit a sweet spot in power and usability. It’s still not a piece of cake for those used to Windows, but it’s stable, flexible, and really easy. Read through this exhaustive review from uber-tech site Ars Technica for a solid learning experience whether you’re a Mac rookie or experienced user.

Ars Reviews iLife ‘09: making the cut with iMovie and iPhoto – Ars Technica.