Deke's Techniques 225: Animating Bird Wings with Puppet Warp
Deke uses the Puppet Warp feature in Photoshop to duplicate and animate the wings of a bird of prey.
See more from dekePod »

Create A Logo, Quickly, in InDesign of All Things

Submitted by colleen on 17 April 2013 - 12:15pm.

In honor of the upcoming (perennially awesome) PEPCON (Print and eProduction Conference) in Austin at the end of the month, I've decided to remember how to use InDesign. I've also been thinking about how lovers of great Photoshop and Illustrator techniques (often synonymous with "fans of Deke") may be interested in showing off their images with InDesign's layout features, especially as a subscription to the Creative Cloud now makes access to ID essentially free. 

But to ease into the layout program after a diet of mostly graphics and photos, I thought I'd start with this tutorial, extracted from Deke's Up & Running with InDesign course at lynda.com, on how to make a quick and easy logo. Deke uses some familiar tools, like the Rectangle shape tool and Pathfinder, that will help PS and AI users aclimate to the InDesign environment. 

In the mood to read rather than watch? Don't have access to the lynda.com sample files? Here's an illustrated step-by-step recounting of how I adapted this tutorial to create my own personal logo from scratch inside InDesign:  Read more » 

. Tagged with:

Deke's Techniques 215: Defringing Purples and Greens in Camera Raw 7

Submitted by deke on 16 April 2013 - 12:15am.
Deke's Techniques 215: Defringing Purples and Greens in Camera Raw 7

Hey, gang. It's me, Deke! Actually writing a blog post for my very own site. Weird! But, honestly, Colleen's so good at it, who needs me underfoot?

Even so, in rare form, I attend (hello!) to announce this week's free technique. Now I warn you, this movie is not terribly humorous or exciting. In fact, while watching it, I yawned once. Okay, twice. But it was late. And besides, this movie is seriously educational. Perhaps even dangerously so. For this week, I explain how to use the Defringe slider bars in Adobe Camera Raw 7, which ships with Photoshop CS6.

Oh, crap, that sounds dull as shit, even with all the italics.

We start with the following helpful sign that warns men with chest erections not to stumble off obvious cliffs. Wait, no, I have that wrong---there's no red slash through the sign. So it must recommend that men with chest erections stumble off obvious cliffs. Phew, boy am I glad I misread that sign! I'm pretty sure I had a massive arm-shaped chest erection at the time.

The Danger-Don't-Fall-Off-This-Cliff Guy

Sadly, that misses the point, and it's already much more entertaining than the boring-ass video that accompanies this post. Which, if I haven't already mentioned it, is dull. Great grandpappy-discretion advised. Read more » 

. Tagged with:

ADIM13: The Designer Undead at Play

Submitted by colleen on 13 April 2013 - 5:15pm.

My dekeEnstien monsters! We have survived (sort of, if you count being undead as a form of survival) ADIM 13, the incomparable design masterclass brought back to life last by the equally incomparable Russell Brown. Call this an early call to action to consider going to ADIM 14. There really is nothing like it. 

Russell provides macs, special output devices (this year wood engraving, beer glass etching, and metallic printing), and advice from a line up of Creative Cloud experts. This year, he also brought out the festive theme of Monsters and Microbrews. Participants were challenged to create a beer bottle label, a wood beer carrier, and an etched glass as part of the three-day project. 

The vibe was so undead cool at the St. Julien Hotel that Deke and I abandoned his south Boulder condo in order to move in for the conference. It was terrific to hang out with enthusiastic designers and familiar friends. Of course, you can't attend such an event without being infected, by both the creative spirit, and perhaps, something more sinister... Let me tell you the tale in pictures. 

At the opening cocktail party, Deke and our host, Zombie Lincoln, get in a battle over the last Kobe beef slider.

Would there be ramifications for this encounter? Read on to find out:  Read more » 

. Tagged with:

Deke's Techniques 212: Creating Synthetic Water Droplets in Photoshop

Submitted by colleen on 9 April 2013 - 1:53am.

Long time dekeItarians know how much I love a good Deke's Techniques that manages to create something (in this case water droplets---mini puddles, really) out of nothing (in this case, a Photoshop layer style applied to a randomly generated pattern.) Here's the effect that Deke created in this week's episode, against a wood background: 

Fabricated water drops on wood in Photoshop

But Deke claims that you can create these mini-puddles against any background. And so I set out to prove that was true using a tile image from Fotolia.com artist Magann instead of Deke's wooden one. Here are the steps, so you can prove it yourself against your own background:  Read more » 

. Tagged with:

Deke Challenge Winner Authors New Course at lynda.com

Submitted by colleen on 8 April 2013 - 3:06pm.

Little did we know when we held last year's Deke's Techniques challenge that we were also going on a talent search for lynda.com. But in fact, the winner of the Photoshop Challenge (that classic "It's a Plaid, Plaid World") has now created her first course. This movie above is an excerpt from Robin Schneider's new course, Illustrator for Fashion Design: Drawing Flats.

Congratulations (again), Robin. We'll be able to say we knew you when. And for those of you who would like to try out Robin's course (and of course a pile of courses by some guy named Deke, too), you can get a free seven-day trial at lynda.com/deke.  Read more » 

. Tagged with:
« first‹ previous123456789…next ›last »