It's entirely possible that a few of you have had your fill of the "101 Photoshop Tips in 5 Minutes" piece and the navel-gazing that accompanies it at this site. (If it’s any consolation, Colleen and I are actually trying to balance things with a steady stream of content.) But if my manic performance somehow leaves you wanting more, you can listen to Chuck Joiner's audio interview with me at MacVoices.com. It’s largely my personal behind-the-scenes story of the making of the video, which as you’ll learn, wreaked havoc on my thighs. (Colleen’s article documents the day and a half of live-action shooting, but quite a bit happened before that.)

Read more » 

When you're working in various Creative Suite applications, you can change the color of the background in a document to suit your mood, reduce distractions from your work environment, or test to see how your project is going to look in the environment where it will eventually live.

In Photoshop, it's relatively simple. You have two options:

1) The first is to right-click. (Do I still need to say Control-click on the Mac? Is anyone out there foolish enough to not have a two-button mouse? Seriously, I need to know because Deke and I are bound to butt editorial opinions on this!) On the background, and choose from one of three options: Gray, Black, or Custom. The other item in the context menu, Select Custom Color, brings up the somewhat annoying but familiar Color Picker that lets you change that Custom color item to anything you want, including any number of choices from the Color Libraries.

2) The second way is to Shift-click with the Paint Bucket tool (which lives in the same slot as the Gradient tool), to fill your background with whatever you have your foreground color set to.

Read more » 

No, that's not an eerie full moon rising, it's an even eerier not quite setting sun. The skies all over in Northern California are filled with smoke due to hundreds of burning wildfires. I thought it was pretty freaky I could shoot at the sun and not completely blow out highlights—or my retina. (Despite the smoke, looking through the viewfinder directly at the sun probably wasn't the most intelligent thing to do). Usually summers here in the Sacramento Valley have several days of unhealthy air, due to auto exhaust and high temperatures, but this feels worse, and downright odd.

One of the fires further north is threatening the home of one of our beloved Planet Deke colleagues. Team Deke is sending out our strongest heat-shield, fire-retardant, force-field energy to Toby and others whose homes (and persons) are threatened by the fires. The particular fire threatening Toby's homestead is one of those going entirely unmanaged. Read more » 

In less than 40 hours from launch, dekePod hit #9 on the technology podcast list, making it (for slightly more than 24 hours) the top-ranking Photoshop podcast on iTunes.

Mind you, it didn't stay there. In fact, my guess is that the strong initial showing was due at least in part to the backlog of folks who began subscribing to dekePod back in 2006.

I guess the challenge now is to stay regular and see how it fares.

Note: this entry has been edited -- cuz I can!