When you take photos of a scene with varying lights your camera can’t capture the whole range of lights. It usually meters the average causing your brights to be too bright and your darks to be too dark. A lot of times this sums up to an awful photo.

Joshua Keay is a product designer living in New York City, and in this video tutorial he shows how you can fix these photos with Photoshop in under 5 minutes.

When faced with wildly differing light and dark values in a single frame, your camera can’t record everything, so it has to make a choice. Usually, it does its best to meter for the average light in the scene. That means the bright stuff ends up being too bright or the dark stuff too dark… or a little of both. Those dark areas aren’t lost, however. Often, they’re hiding detail that the camera just barely saw. Make a few subtle adjustments in Photoshop, and you’re on your way to an improved image!

The video is available at Photojojo, so head up there and learn how to fix up those under-exposed areas in your photos in a snap.

Ever wonder what Google is up to? You might get an idea from their growing list of domains. Currently at the moment of this writing Google owns 520 domains. Their domain collecting business has been going on for the last couple years, mostly from companies they acquired bought. Some domains are just weird IMHO, like allevil.org which doesn’t fit their company motto, Do no evil. Or maybe they’re just trying to keep evil from spreading? They’re very wise however to snatch domains that sound similar to Google. I’m sure this is typo prevention so people can type Google the wrong way and still reach their main site. Some of these domains are googel.com, gogle.com, gogole.com and wwwgoogle.com. You can see the complete list at Pronet Advertising. Now I wonder what they’ll do with porngoogle.com. Another evil prevention scheme?

While the original Million Dollar Homepage focused on the idea of selling pixels, TagsPage is more of a Web 2.0 experiment with textual tags. It gives webmasters (and bloggers) a chance to promote their website (or blog) with their favorite keyword (tag). It’s a great for SEO since you get a high-quality backlink on your particular term. It also serves as a directory for random surfers to browse through. At $5 a character their prices are cheaper than the original Million Dollar Page, and their approach, we’d say, very worthwhile. And if you’re too cheap a little skeptical about this you can test the waters by posting your tag on their free pages.

Via Elliott Back.

SEOmoz has helped quite a few companies and websites drive significant traffic to their sites. They use these effective methods which they now share with the blogosphere.

#10 - Targeting Unmonetized Searches
#9 - Creating Controversy
#8 - Maps & Mashups
#7 - Event Coverage
#6 - Top Ten Lists
#5 - Online Tools
#4- Graphic & Web Design
#3 - Leveraging Social Networks
#2 - Blogging & Blog Comments
#1 - Reporting Remarkable News
#0 - Offering Something Incredible

You may find their breakdown useful on their original article, 10 Remarkably Effective Strategies for Driving Traffic.

Jason Calacanis of Weblogs, Inc. is in the market for the top users on DIGG, Delicious, Flickr, MySpace, and Reddit. His offer, $12,000 a year in exchange of 150 stories a month - basically less than what these top users are already doing without pay.

It’s interesting to see the blogosphere mutate from an innocent way for people to express themselves into an expanding money market.

As Jason puts it:

Talent wins, and talent needs to get paid. I love paying talented people so they can sleep well at night doing what they love. That’s my biggest joy in business: gettin’ people paid.

I guess what matters at the end of the day is… everybody’s gotta eat!

From The Jason Calacanis Weblog via ProBlogger.

We all like to procrastinate from time to time all the time, so it’s important to formulate new working habits to work around our slack. Here’s a good work hack from LifeClever that might help you become a more effective worker.

I’ve implemented the (10+2)*5 procrastination hack with a shareware application called Meridian. So what is this (10+2)*5 math mumbo jumbo, you ask? The idea is simple: dedicate a fixed amount of 10 minutes for work and 2 minutes for play. Repeat 5 times.

• 10 - Work for ten minutes with single-minded focus on moving toward completion on a single task. Ten minutes, and that’s all you’re allowed to do is work, work, work. No cheating, because (DING!) you actually get a break when you’re done…
• 2 - After ten minutes of sweaty, dedicated work you get a 2-minute break to do whatever you want—drink coffee, read 5ives, call your bookie, whatever. When the two minutes are up, it’s back to work on the next task on your list. This is important.
• You’re going to iterate this four more times for a total of one hour’s working/breaking

They chose Meridian because it has multiple timers and doesn’t take up too much real estate, but you can use your own favorite timer. I suggest using the old fashion chess clock. *ding* it’s work time… *ding* it’s time to call the bookie… *ding* Uhhh you get the point.

If we lived in a perfect world then those stars and celebrities in the magazines are for real. Unfortunately not, and people in real life aren’t perfect. That’s where Photoshop comes in, smoothing away your skin blemishes, zits, blackheads, freckles, etc to make you look like a fashion model. How? Check out Mizuno’s Super Airbrush PP Tutorial - written step by step to help you transform yourself (and your loved ones) like magic.

Via LifeClever