ACR

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.

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 » 

In this week's free Deke's Techniques episode, Deke imagines himself the king of the Irish castle we dramafied last week. And he imagines his reign took place in Ye Olde Sepia-Toned Tymes. Which is sort of hard to reconcile, given this Dunguaire Castle was built around 1520, long before the 1980s when Photoshop came along to make photos look like they came from the early 1930s. And yet, his method for antiquing a photo is useful in any age, long past the Imaginary Sepia Age of King Deke the Creative of County Clare.

Here's a before (left side) and after (right) view of Deke's halluncinatory ancestral home, replete with delightful grain and decay in the after photo: 

So even if your goal is not to make a photo of a 600-year-old castle look roughly like it was taken 100 years ago, this Camera Raw-based process will be useful for oldifying your own photos, giving them a carefully crafted antique look that goes way beyond your standard Instagram filter. 

Read on for the simple steps in this process:  Read more » 

My dear dekeO'politans, are you in the St. Patrick's Day spirit yet? It's just our luck that Deke has decided that this week's Deke's Techniques episode features an Irish castle that we stumbled upon on our trip to the Emerald Isle. In this week's video, you'll see how Deke took that ordinary vacation photo and turned it into this dramatic image (complete with mysterious woman in red on the left.)How did Deke turn the interesting but nondescript photo shown below into the dramatic photo above? With the help and power of Adobe Camera Raw.  Here is the original inside the ACR interface, ready for its makeover:

Read on to witness the transformation of this "Oh, pull over, this looks mildly interesting" photo into the dramatic "Oh, this is why we came to Ireland" landscape: Read more »