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Deke's Techniques 055: Creating Type that Inverts Anything Behind It

Submitted by deke on 24 January 2012 - 12:15am.
Deke's Techniques 055: Creating Type that Inverts Anything Behind It

As those of you who work regularly in Photoshop know, inverting is a precarious proposition. Consider this: Have you ever drawn a path outline with the pen tool? In the spirit of making things obvious, Photoshop represents the path by inverting the composite image. Where the image is white, the path appears black; where the image is black, the path appears white. And where the image is gray, the path is the inversion of gray, which is---oh, that's right---gray! And because you can't see gray-on-gray, the damn thing goes invisible. And your typical image is gray, or near gray, a lot.

So obviously, Photoshop's design choice where path outlines is concerned is a mistake. But now let's put you in charge of the design choice. And let's imagine that you want to create text that inverts in front of a composite image. And you don't want to make the same mistake Photoshop makes. While working inside Photoshop. What do you do?

You make text that inverts unambiguously. Where the image is white, the text is black; where the image is black, the text is white. And where the image is gray, or near gray, the text provides as much contrast as possible.

That's what this week's technique is all about. And as if that wasn't rambling enough, here's the official description from lynda.com (which Colleen tells me is much less self-inverted and ambiguous): Read more » 

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Deke's Techniques 033: Changing the Color of a Car

Submitted by deke on 16 August 2011 - 12:15am.
Deke's Techniques 033: Changing the Color of a Car

Have you ever noticed that an awful lot of Photoshop experts spend an awful lot of time doing an awful lot of stuff to pictures of cars? As an equal-opportunity image editor, I've never quite understood the car fixation. (I own a Jeep. So, seriously, I'm lucky to put gas in the damn thing.) "But, you know," I thought one enlightened afternoon, "Maybe it's me. Maybe I'm the guy who's spending too much time on image stacks and 3D type and ink drawings and synthetic starfields and artificial wood grain and stereoscopic imagery and fake monsters. Maybe I should jump in a jalopy, roll down the windscreen, and edit a car."

And so this week I have. In fact, I do the most typical thing imaginable: I change a car's color. Only in the least typical, and most reliable, way that there is.

Here's the official description from lynda.com: Read more » 

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Photoshop Top 40, Feature #9: Levels

Submitted by deke on 16 February 2010 - 12:15am.
Feature #9: Levels

Feature #9 is my favorite adjustment command: Levels. Adjusted only slightly since its introduction in Version 1.0, this seminal feature lets you set the black and white points, as well as correct the midtones without harming either. It refrains from clipping colors unless you tell it to. It boasts Photoshop's first on-board histogram. And it works as well in CMYK and Lab as in RGB.

(Well there's another clue for you all.)

We had nearly twice as many entries last week as the week before, with 19 of you correctly guessing Levels or some variation. The winner is earthrat, whose guessed "Using Levels to work." Congrats to earthrat!

Now it's time to guess Feature #8. Hint: It's the ultimate convenience tool. All members have been sent an email invitation with a URL to enter the contest. (No direct URL this time around.) Join dekeOnline now to receive a reminder and an invitation to next week's contest!
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The Big and Gritty Black-and-White Sky

Submitted by deke on 9 January 2010 - 12:02am.

I celebrated the New Year with a winter sports vacation through Jackson Hole, Wyoming and Big Sky, Montana. Folks call it Big Sky Country, but between you and me, the tall mountains leave a narrower-than-average glimpse of the sky. (Pancake-flat Nebraska, now that's some big sky.) But the land is huge. Vast and sparse. Peopled but underpopulated. Earth on an almost antique and undeniably humbling scale. And the sky aside, ultimately enormous.

In this post, I present you with 13 black-and-white images, all but one captured with an Olympus E-30 or Stylus 1030. Some might call it a travelogue, but I see it more as an experimental portrait of space. I say “experimental” because many of these images exhibit flaws. Beautiful and purposeful flaws. My idea is that a digital image, like a painting, tells a story beyond that of its subject matter. A story of process and approach, one of development and media, a documentation of the power and limitations of tools.

Consider the Grand Tetons below. Comprising 11 vertically oriented telephoto photographs, this 500MB composition is a testament to the power of Photoshop’s Photomerge command. But the moment I attacked the image with the Color Range command--with the sole intention of enhancing that big sky--I revealed a series of striations across the clouds and foreground snow. (Click the thumbnail below to reveal the image in detail.) Normally, I would retry the effect to avoid these artifacts, but this time, I added Levels, Black & White, and Smart Sharpen with an eye toward exaggerating the effect. I did everything with layers--nondestructively, as it were--and yet plainly the image is stressed.

That said, I for one like the results. Read more » 

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Photoshop Top 40, Feature #36: Black & White

Submitted by deke on 11 August 2009 - 12:15am.
Feature #36: Black & White

Today marks the fifth installment of "Photoshop Top 40," the ongoing series that promises to tour you through Photoshop's 40 best features, starting at #40 and eventually working its way up to #1. (Which, assuming I've done my math right, will appear sometime in April of 2010.) Feature #36 is "Black & White," which lets you distill a full-color photograph into the best of all possible black-and-white images, one range of colors at a time. Read more » 

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