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Today's installment of Deke's Techniques shows you how to create an entirely automated background pattern using a trio of smart filters and a pattern overlay. Here's the official (and extremely awesome) description:

It's another week and time for another quick technique from Deke. In this week's episode, Deke shows you how to create something heartily substantial from something virtually nonexistent. Specifically, Deke creates a hammered metal background (featured behind last week's gold type) from insubstantial clouds and glass. Leave it to Photoshop (and Deke) to create such opportunities for irony.

Start with a field of black pixels, apply some smart filters, and top it off with a little rusty metal pattern, and you have a wall of textured metal that will support any creation you want to build on top of it. And because you're using the Clouds and Difference Clouds filters, which are based on random fractal noise, your wall of steel won't look exactly like anyone else's when you put it to use in your own projects. Read more » 

Just as most of us take for granted clean water and fast food, we give little thought to the fact that Photoshop offers an eyedropper. Press the I key to get it. Then click in an image to sample a color and use it elsewhere. The tool is simple, ubiquitous (the target adjustment tool is the most recent derivation), and it's not even an Adobe invention. When Photoshop first set the Macintosh world on fire 20 years ago (three years in advance of the PC version), all 12 of the program's competitors offered some kind of color-dipping "dropper."

But a couple of years later, after Photoshop proved itself the only pixel editor with a future, its eyedropper was virtually the last one standing. And just picture a world without it! Even the most run-of-the-mill JPEG image offers 16.8 million color variations. Imagine the time you would waste if you had to dial in every one of those colors numerically or select it from a science lab-style color field. And as the video shows, lifting a foreground color is merely one of the eyedropper's many abilities.

For those of you tracking the contest, this week's winner is ovityons, who guessed "The eyedropper tool" within 15 minutes of the contest going live. Congratulations, ovityons!

Now it's time to guess Feature #7. Hint: You can't save this trio of functions, but they can save you. (How's that for a riddle?) Read more »