Wow, I can’t believe that we have passed the 10,000 mark on images submitted to our gallery site. That’s amazing! You have been so busy – the team has been looking through and commenting on your images as well as rating them, so why don’t you do the same? It’s great to receive constructive feedback on artwork – so give, and you might very well receive in return!Let’s try for 11,000 now…

It’s the first day back after a lovely break and it’s taking some time to get used to having to work again! But I spent the first part of this morning going through the images submitted on our gallery site over the last couple of weeks – it looks like you’ve been very busy! Next to tackle is my mountain of emails, including all the entries for our web challenge that ended today. The next one will be up and running in the next couple of days, as soon as we’ve finished judging all the entries we have in for the AP 052 comp. We’re also fast approaching deadline for issue 53, so that’ll throw the whole team back in the deep end! Stacey is busy with the cover at the moment – it’s going to be a good one! Adam is already writing next issue and I’m just trying to figure out where I left off last year!I hope you all had a good New Year!

It’s nearly that time of year. I am literally watching my countdown clock on my desktop, which tells me that I have 1 day, 15 hours, 7 minutes and 32 seconds till Christmas Day morning! Here at Imagine Publishing, the Creative department has been counting down Christmas since 1 December, and we’re all surrounded by Christmas trees (just the four biggies and five minis this year) and far too much chocolate.So, to all Advanced Photoshop readers and website users, I wish you a massive Merry Christmas from the whole Advanced Photoshop team: Stacey (our wonderful new designer), Adam (senior staff writer and Photoshop expert), Steve (multimedia editor), Sam (sub editor, who has left for Christmas already!) and me! We’ll all be out of the office from the end of play tomorrow and we’ll be back on 5 January.I will do my best in-between mince pies to approve your images over the break, but I won’t get your emails until I get back.See you in 2009!1 day, 15 hours, 2 minutes and 2 seconds (wow, that took me a while to write my post) to go!

Advanced Photoshop 51 hits the shelves tomorrow…The best features, interviews and artist profiles:-Industry Insight: Photoshop trends of 2009-Interview with Aaron Sims-CS4 reviewed and ratedChallenging and inspiring Masterclasses, including:-Create a realistic snow scene-Fake HDR from one photo-Design a steampunk-inspired imageAlso featuring:-Must-have hardware and software-Helpdesk and Insider Info for Photoshop advice-Free CD with brushes, project files and more

You might have noticed on our Photoshop Daily news blog that Imagine Publishing (publisher of Advanced Photoshop) has announced the launch of a great new DVD: The Beginner’s Guide To Photoshop. With over 90 minutes of video tutorials in our favourite app, I reckon it’s a great Christmas gift for anyone who needs to get to grips with Photoshop’s features and functions. It’s just £19.99 and you can get it from the  Imagine eShop. I’ll definitely be checking it out!

Hi Gallery gang, just a quick notice to all users. We are glad to see everyone getting involved and giving  every one a fair rating out of five for their artwork. However, we have noticed, for instance, that some artworks have had 50 visits, a five-star rating, yet NO comments left. We can’t stress enough how great it is to know why your artwork has achieved a certain mark, so please leave a comment if you rate the images. That’s why it’s there, and it is a constructive way to help others improve.Many thanks, Adam Smith, senior staff writer

I’ve been looking forward to the release of Adobe’s Configurator for a while, and it’s now available for download from Adobe Labs (http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/configurator/). Why? Because I can’t wait to start making my own panels! It would be so handy to have all the tools I use every day in one place. But it’s more than that. It opens up a whole new way of presenting tutorials – one panel in CS4 could lead you through the creation of a whole new effect. John Nack’s amazing Adobe blog has a roundup of some of the first wave of panels to be released, but I imagine that we will see a complete influx of them soon. Has anyone used Configurator yet? I’d love to see what you’ve come up with!

Advanced Photoshop strives to bring you innovative and fresh editorial within our related articles. Issue 50 especially. This issue delivered contemporary layouts, diverse resources and great exposure for over 100 artists. Overall, it was a big success and we’d like to thank everyone who contributed.However, with such a mammoth issue, we must apologise to a couple of our artists for article misprints and so you, the reader, aren’t left without appropriate contacts and resources.We’d like to apologies to both international freelance designers George Smith and Kirk Nelson for our website misprints within our 50 Top Tips feature.George Smith’s website is in fact www.endeffect.com and not www.georgesmith.co.uk.Kirk Nelson has no official website presently, so www.trikirk.com is invalid. However, if Kirk’s previous works in our issues appeal to you, he can be contacted at kirkthreed@gmail.com.Again, sincere apologies for any problems this may have caused our artists and readers.

As Julie is away today taking a well-earned rest after a manic 50th issue, and I’m back from a little break myself (cheering on the mighty Spurs to their first win, good times, good times), I thought I’d update you guys on AP’s visit to the CreativePro Expo at the Olympia National Hall last Thursday.Needless to say, it was a hotbed of commercial and creative activity and well worth the trip. And, of course, I was there to sample the digital delights. Making some worthy contacts, we’re hoping here at the mag that these relationships will allow us to further provide readers with examples and opinions of some of the industry’s top hardware and software technologies. So keep an eye out for new developments over the coming issues.

Get your entries in for the latest Peer Pressure challenge, now up on the website! Pick one, two or three of the available images and do what you like with them in Photoshop, email them in to me and the top three will be selected to be printed in the magazine. The winner will also receive a great book from David & Charles and will be shown on the website under the Challenge Winners link. I can’t wait to see what you can come up with this month!