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I couldn't wait to get my hands on CS5 to try the coolest new feature; Content Aware Fill.  This allows a user to remove items from an image and the algorithms in Photoshop will attempt to fill in the pixels by looking at the rest of the image. Here is the first attempt.

While this is far from perfect, all in all this took me 5 minutes to accomplish.  I did learn that the "brain" behind the process is not all knowing. If your image has a dark vignette (natural or otherwise), it will take this into account and add dark colors to the mix.  This is similar to the healing brush getting too close to a dark edge.  I took care of this by lightening the vignette in Lightroom (could have used lens correction) before running the content aware fill and then using the content aware healing brush to clean up what was left. It still has a couple of bad spots, but hey it took 5 minutes.

At the request of one of my two visitors, this is a photo taken in the Azores during one of their cow jams.  The photo was processed using the Impasto filter from AlienSkin in Photoshop CS4. Click for large version.

I have been "playing" with a couple of plugins from Alien Skin and OnOne and I think the results are great.  There have been photos I have taken with a painting in mind, but could never reproduce the results.  This is about to change.  Below is a series of photos that I have "painted" using the Alien Skin Snap Art 2 plugin.  Let me know what you think.

Dave Cross provides a great tutorial on wrapping text around an object in Photoshop.  Also featured in the tutorial is a great website for generating dummy text.