As you may know, we are looking for motivated, talented and professional guest authors. And we are paying each author $100-300 per post — depending on the quality of the delivered article. If you think that you are one of them contact us — we want you, we need you, we can't live without you and we would really be happy to have you in our Smashing team.

And to spark your interest for writing we've decided to announce a guest author contest — write a small guest article for Smashing Magazine and win one of dozens of attractive prizes waiting for you.

Best guest articles will be published on Smashing Magazine with the link to the author's site. The best guest post will be determined by the editorial team and will be awarded with Apple MacBook Air, a compact, ultrathin 13.3" laptop (1.6 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo Processor, 2 GB RAM, 80 GB Hard Drive) released by Apple few months ago.

If you have been following Smashing Magazine for a while you know that we love high-quality freebies. Over the last years we’ve featured a number of designers and developers who released their work for free — among other things we presented high-quality free fonts, free Wordpress themes, free wallpapers and, of course, free icons. You can find them in our section Freebies.

Every release helps to make the Web a nicer place which is why we support designers and challenge them to release something for free in order to be featured on Smashing Magazine. And the results are quite often pretty impressive.

Today we are glad to release a wordpress.fun — a free professional Wordpress-theme. The theme has 2 columns, thumbnails integration, a "featured" post section as well as a nice grungy design. The theme was designed by Maleika Attawel from Germany, purchased by Smashing Magazine and is now released as a gift for our readers.

Beauty retouching is probably one of the most popular application areas in which Adobe Photoshop is used extensively. There are two simple reasons for that. First, Photoshop offers a variety of advanced tools to smooth out skin and hair, optimize body proportions and emphasize some beautiful details. And second, if you have some experience with Photoshop it is easy to learn the basics and quickly produce very impressive and beautiful results.

Of course, beauty-retouching is a quite deceptive art. The masters of Photoshop create illusions which are hard to tell apart — unless you have both a genuine photo and the final result in Photoshop and can directly compare them. In fact, every day we consume perfectly retouched stars and models online and offline which just look different in the real life.

Still, it is not the reason to avoid learning advanced Photoshop techniques for beauty-retouching and study examples of how it is done in practice. The list below presents both image-tutorials as well as video-tutorials. Most examples have a before-vs.-after-comparison and you can follow the modifications with Photoshop step-by-step.

You may want to take a look at the further Photoshop tutorials selections we've presented earlier:

• Adobe Photoshop Tutorials: Best Of
• Adobe Photoshop Video Tutorials: Best Of
• Adobe Photoshop Tutorials: Rainbows, Glows and Light Effects

Although light is considered to be rather a practical than an artistic tool, it has some properties which designers can effectively explore in their works. Indeed, light can also be considered as a medium for more powerful and more vivid artistic expression. In fact, many artists and crews make use of it creating quite impressive works of art.

In this episode of our Monday Inspiration series we present 50 beautiful examples of light art — paintings, sculptures, drawings and graffitts which were created using light. At the bottom of this post you will find references to related Flickr pools which contain thousands of further examples of what can be achieved out of creative experiments with light.

When it comes to beauty nothing can beat the beauty of nature. Although we, designers, can derive inspiration from almost everything, nature often manages to provide us with beautiful eye-catching perspectives we would never have explored otherwise. We have collected hundreds of wallpapers already (see links below). In this post we would like to focus on wallpapers which emphasize the variety and beauty of nature.

This post showcases 50 remarkable nature desktop wallpapers. This post covers various themes and subjects; we have included both photographic and artistic (photo-manipulated) wallpapers. Hopefully, everybody will find something from himself / herself.

You may want to take a look at related posts:

• (Really) Stunning Desktop Wallpapers
• More (Really) Stunning Desktop Wallpapers
• Space Wallpapers and Nebula Wallpapers