Productivity is a crucial asset of professional designers. Photoshop is an extremely powerful application for photo processing and image manipulation, and we can make it even more powerful by using handy tools, actions, plugins and templates to save time for solving mundane regular tasks. The better our professional tool set is, the more time we can spend to focus on the actual design process rather than the tool we are using to implement it on screen.

Here at Smashing Magazine, we’re continuously searching for recent time-saving, useful Photoshop resources for our readers, to make the search of these ever-growing techniques easier. We hope that these techniques will help you improve your design skills as well as your professional workflow when using Adobe Photoshop. A sincere thanks to all designers and developers whose articles are featured in this roundup. We respect and appreciate your contributions to the design community.

Lately, Apple Keynote has been gaining popularity among designers as a wireframing and prototyping tool. Features like multiple slide masters, styles, grouping, animation and hyperlinks make it ideal for crafting interactive prototypes and UI narratives. Today’s freebie, Keynotopia, is a free set of interface elements for Keynote that makes it possible for anyone to create these prototypes in minutes. All elements are hand-crafted in Apple Keynote, and organized in nested groups for easier manipulation and customization. The templates can be used in Keynote 09 and 08 and are designed by Amir Khella.

Start with a blank presentation, and create a new slide for each application screen. Then copy/paste elements from the wireframe templates into your slides, and edit their labels, sizes and colors. To save time, group elements together, and use master slides to share common interface and navigation components across multiple screens. Finally, add hyperlinks to enable user interaction, and use slide transitions to create cool interface animations.

In this post we release a yet another freebie: BlueMasters, a free PSD template, designed by Wendell Fernandes and released for Smashing Magazine and its readers. As usual, the theme is free to use in private and commerical projects.

BlueMasters is a dark, sexy, custom theme that has a solid, professional look and a very simple structure. You can access all files and layers used in a well organized structure and naming convention, making it easier for slicing the template or modifying it. BlueMasters can be customized to fit your business brand as well as your clients’ websites.