CS5.5

As I recorded this one, I worried it might be received as a bit lame. As in "Making a frame? Around an image? In Photoshop? With a drop shadow? Are you serious? WTF?"

But, on balance, in retrospect and stuff, it's actually a solid technique. Watch it if you dare. Meanwhile, here's the official description from lynda.com: Read more » 

Happy Valentine's Day.

In honor of the occasion, I've come up with a tasty red candy of a technique, based on a tragically misunderstood Illustrator feature called the Reshape tool. It's a kind of boy finds tool, boy loses tool, but gets tool back kinda movie.

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

This week's technique demonstrates how to create a very specific and internet-famous flavor of optical illusion. When viewed from far away, today's image appears as one thing; when viewed close up, it appears as another. Read more » 

In this week's video, I show you how to create professional-quality movie poster credits in Adobe Illustrator. Now in case you're thinking, "Hmm, gosh, I don't give a crap about making movie credits," well, that's not really the point. And now, in case you're thinking, "No really, Deke, when I say I don't give a crap, I mean, literally, I would not give you an ounce of my own crap to learn how to make movie poster credits," yes, you've made yourself clear. (And crudely so. You're normally so nice. What is with you today?) But here's the thing. Read more » 

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 »