As an instructor, I post quite a lot of this type of site— the "inspiration sites." I love the craft of designing a business card, and often the examples I refer to take the format of the business card to completely new dimensions: stainless steel cards, cards printed on wood, innovative shapes, and incredible folding forms.
Every so often though, I like the more restrained. The reality of being a designer is that the vast majority of clients aren't amenable to spending a small fortune to print on custom fabricated fiber-glass and aluminum cards using specially formulated ink. The parameters of the pragmatic job also require occasional external inspiration.
I recently came across this video on a Photography site that I frequent (Petapixel). Its provocatively entitled "10 Powerful Photoshop Techniques every Photographer Should Know."
Many times (as Petapixel contributor DL Cade states) these articles are a bit of a letdown. I found a few of the approaches in this video pretty interesting and not too basic nor too difficult.
Its worth a view on a lazy weekend, and at 36 minutes long it covers several topics.
Face Aware Liquify Filters | 0:53
Color Lookup Tables | 4:30
Transform a Selection | 8:07
Frequency Separation | 9:03
Calculations for Selecting Hair | 15:06
Selective Sharpening w/ High Pass | 20:46
Color Range on Live Mask | 24:12
Curves | 27:21
Combine Adjustment Layers with Blend Modes | 29:50
Camera RAW filter on anything (Use Dehaze for interesting contrast) | 32:28
of course, this is a sample for a product that the video's authors (Tutvid) are hawking for a small fee...but I don't mind the free teasers that these places toss to us every so often. Enjoy.
Marc LeVoy, a Google employee and "visiting" lecturer at Stanford, recently put a free copy of his University Course online via Google Sites, for FREE ACCESS. While it may lack some of the full lecture support (a good deal of it, however, is in Video format via YOUTUBE) it is pretty much the Stanford Undergrad course he delivered.
