burn

Hey gang,

As seems to occur every Tuesday, I have a new free Deke's Techniques video for you, produced by lynda.com. And it's a zinger! (Am I allowed to say "zinger" over the Internet?) In just 9 minutes, I show you how to turn an untreated studio photograph--generously provided by Jason Stitt of the Fotolia image library--into a high key, high contrast image, with ultra-black shadows but not so much as a single clipped highlight. Read more » 

Hey gang,

Today, I am on a plane flying halfway across the world on a week-long vacation. But thanks to the miracle of me writing this post four days in advance, I appear to be "here" today. Wherever "here" is.

Anyway, "here's" the thing: Today marks the second in my "never-ending" series of Deke's Techniques. (That's right: I will die, you will die, the human race will die, the robot overlords who destroyed us will die. And yet---I don't understand how---Deke's Techniques will continue. When the Vulcans discover Earth, this is all they will find. I know, when I first heard, I was like: how messed up is that?)

Today's episode is about using type in Photoshop to brand an image. Imagine that your image is a cow or a pig. And the type is a big hot branding iron. Only much gentler on both the giver and receiver. (Come on, no one wants to hurt livestock! Unless, you know, if a cheerful young fattened pig accidentally died, in which case I'd totally throw down for a plate-full of its bacon.) Here's Colleen's official description: Read more » 

Just three features ago, I demonstrated the Liquify filter, which I described as "one of Photoshop's great destructive retouching tools" (see Feature #29: Liquify). The words one of implied that more were on the way, as they are, starting this week with two tools that recently rose like twin Pheonix from the ashes, dodge and burn.

Like Liquify, D&B permanently modify pixels in the interest of making those pixels look better than when they started. Both are brushes. The dodge tool brushes in brightness; the burn tool brushes in darkness. Read more »