Some of you have expressed interest as to when (or even if) my final course, Photoshop CS6 One-on-One: Mastery, will go live at my beloved video publisher lynda.com.

First, let me assure you that it will and I am almost done recording the damn thing.

Second, I thought, gosh, I might as well give you a sneak peek into what's in store. There's plenty of exciting stuff---Lighting Effects, Adaptive Wide Angle, animation, and video editing---not to mention a new take on high dynamic range, better known as HDR.

Most of the HDR tips and tricks I've seen present the feature as something like digital magic. (I myself have been guilty of this crime.) But this time I'll be rolling up my sleeves and showing you how this weird and semi-fantastical feature actually works. For example, did you know that, under the right circumstances, you can indeed create an HDR portrait shot?

Using myself as the proverbial guinea pig, I was able to take the following pedestrian portrait shot (captured ever-so-deftly by my buddy Lucas Deming; the pedestrian aspect is altogether my fault):

And transform it into this lustrously volumetric image using Photoshop CS6's enhanced HDR Pro module, entirely without the assistance of Liquify, the Healing Brush, or any selective retouching:

As many of you know, HDR Pro requires multiple shots captured at different exposures. (This began as a three-shot bracketed series, btw.) So how do you manage to capture a living, breathing, flinching human being under such conditions? Answer: Very carefully. Read more » 

My funny dekeIntines. Despite my previously stated aversion to Valentines Day, I know some of you enjoy making gussied up heart-shaped creations for your sweethearts. So, for you last-minute card-makers, I'm going to show you how to fancy up your heart shape just in time to pretend like you planned it all along. No glue or glitter required: 

This glorious, some might say over-the-top glossy heart stars with a simple heart-shaped path which is then shined to insanity in Photoshop using layer effects. What better way to visually share the extreme shininess of your love?

First, you gotta have a heart. Deke's Techniques has featured two ways to make a heart shape for the drawing challenged. I'm going to use the one created in Deke's Techniques 026: How to Make a Classic Heart in Illustrator. You could also steal the heart created in Deke's Techniques 193: Drawing an ISOTYPE Couple in Love in Illustrator using nothing but stroke and fill effects, just be sure to convert the final shape to a path outline (as Deke explains in the movie.)

I've also employed a suitably sensuous background, image #113263 from the Fotolia image library, to ensure my project is lovingly lurid. (And photographer cygnusx has some other colors to play with at Fotolia if passionate purple or magic magenta is more your thing.)

Read on to see how to create this glamorous, glossy, glitter-and-glue-free creation in Photoshop.  Read more » 

There are two purposes to today's tutorial. First, to reveal the Photoshop secret handshake for creating a new background layer. Second, to show you how to create an action so that you don't have to perform the entire handshake every time you want a new background for your file. 

First, a point of order. Deke prefers (possibly insists, but he's not answering my call at the moment so I get to do what I want) that one refer to the background layer as simply "a background," because it's not really a free-floating layer. It can't move up the layer stack, it can't be repositioned in the image, it's always the same size as the canvas, and it can't be transparent. For these reasons, I get what Deke is saying. But I'm afraid if I just call it "background" you're gonna envision green grass and blue skies. 

The background layer is most useful for seeing your image against a white, well, background. I'd be willing to guess that most printing of images is done on white paper, and adding the background layer allows you to assess how your image will look when you print. For instance, in the image below, it would be hard to gauge that drop shadow on the gray picture frame element if you were seeing it against a transparent background. Especially since Photoshop indicates transparency with a gray and white checkerboard pattern. But with this background layer in place, you can see (and adjust) that drop shadow accordingly. 

Thing is, creating a Background from an existing layer is a little bit obtuse, in that way that Photoshop can be. Sure, it's only three steps, but I have an entire blog post to write. So, as a bonus to my instructions, I'm going to show you how to record an action that will give you a new background [layer] with a mere keystroke without remembering where that tricky command is hidden. Read to see how it works:  Read more »