blend mode

This week, I have two very special treats for you. The first is a video in which I show you how to employ Photoshop's Dissolve blend mode to create the effect of letters hand-carved into wood. The second is a blow-by-blow text description of the technique, complete with graphics, as written by the Content Curator for lynda.com, Colleen Wheeler.

It's an experiment, so we're eager to hear your thoughts. But I'm guessing you're  gonna like it. Take it away, Colleen:

In this week's free Deke's Techniques, Deke uses Photoshop to create the effect of hand-carved letters in a wooden sign. I don't mean embossing typed-out text into a wood background, but rather making hand-drawn letters look like they were manually carved many years ago into an old wooden sign and weathered over time. To create this effect, Deke uses a blend mode that's fairly uncommon: Dissolve. Because it results in old-style dithered edges, Dissolve is seldom used. But for this particular effect, it provides the gritty, worn edges that we're looking for.

I titled this week's post "Explained" because I thought I'd show you the steps to this technique right here in the blog post. Here's how it's done: Read more » 

Last week, I changed a red car to solid gold and then, in the lynda.com Online Training Library, to jet black. This week, I do something very nearly resembling the opposite. That is to say, I take the "black" (cuz they're really dark gray) stripes on a zebra and render them in color. Which you might not regularly find yourself doing to a zebra. But you may want to do, say, a piece of black-and-white artwork.

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

Welcome to a block of the most powerful options inside Photoshop: Opacity and Blend Modes. These include the options at the top of the Layers palette, not to mention those associated with the brush tool, the Calculations command, and a whole lot more. What these options do is blend pixels together, entirely parametrically--meaning no harm done--using math. Beautiful, lovely, gorgeous math. Read more » 

dekePod Episode 018: Okay, I got good news and I got bad news. Good news first: dekePod has caught up with its younger sibling Martini Hour. For this brief moment in time, both are 18.

Also good, this new episode, it's a doozy. In this video, I show you how to turn any portrait shot--even a sweetly syrupy photo of two youngsters in real honest-to-gosh puppy love--into a credible Andy Warhol silkscreen effect. Complete with minimalist outlines, vivid fills, and lipstick that covers the teeth. Here's the official marketing description: Read more »