CS5.5

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 » 

In today's episode of my weekly video blog, I show you how to create a party with yourself in Photoshop. Specifically, a pool party. Not one involving bathing suits, but rather billiard balls. Just you and a bunch of your favorite clones armed with big sticks and ready for battle.

What the hell am I talking about? Read the official description from lynda.com and find out: Read more » 

So far, I've really lucked out where Deke's Techniques is concerned. The series debuted with "Creating Ice Type" the first Tuesday of 2011, and it became an immediate hit in the lynda.com Online Training Library. I accidentally recorded "Creating a Star Wars Hologram Effect in Photoshop CS6" for the very same week Photoshop CS6 went into public beta. And then I inadvertently recorded "Joining Type to a Circle in Illustrator CS6" for the same week Adobe announced Illustrator CS6.

But where Deke's Techniques: The Challenge is concerned, not so lucky. I recorded an Illustrator technique ("The Octagonal Rings of the Underworld") during the second week of The Photoshop Challenge. I recorded two Photoshop techniques ("Hand-Coloring Line Art in Photoshop" and "Creating a Screen Print Effect in Photoshop") for both weeks of the Illustrator Challenge. And I created this week's technique, which pimps my Facebook page all about The Challenge, for the very week when the damn contest ends. Balls!

But, hey, it's a great technique. And, plus, it begs you to become a fan of facebook.com/dekepod. Which you should do because it's cool, stupid, frivolous, and a waste of time. And who doesn't like wasting time? On the Internet!  How hip is that?

Anyway, today's technique shows you how to create the perfect Facebook cover in Photoshop. Here's the official description from lynda.com: Read more » 

This week, I celebrate Deke's Techniques: The Illustrator Challenge with a Photoshop technique. Which is only fair because a couple of weeks ago, I celebrated The Photoshop Challenge with an Illustrator technique, in which I showed you how to draw the antithesis of the Olympic rings. It's what's known as perfect planning.

The above movie shows you how to take last week's artwork and turn it into a screen printing effect, complete with meticulously misregistered colors. It's a great technique (I love this one!) that ends up producing the happy accident below. Look carefully: The black lines appear out-of-sync with the fill colors, white clouds, and blue sky. And the fill colors and white clouds bleed into the blue sky. But the blue sky never bleeds into the fill colors or the white clouds. The result is a work of mitigated chaos. Do you see what I mean?

It's a fun, clever technique. But I worry that it might be a bit hard to follow without the sample file. Which is why I'm providing the screen printing technique sample file here. Right-click the link and choose Download or Save As.

Two questions: Does the movie make sense? And does the sample file help?

While I await your answers, here's the official description from lynda.com: Read more » 

This week's technique is all about hand-coloring a piece of line art in Photoshop. Which sounds pretty easy, right? I mean, grade schoolers and simpletons know how to color inside the lines. It's the mavericks who know how to color outside them!

But see, in Photoshop, the world's playground is a different asylum. The moment you click on the blue Ps icon, coloring inside the lines becomes an exact science involving ancient tools that few but The Elders remember. For example, do you know how to precisely extract all black lines to an independent layer? Or fill regions defined by one layer into another using the Paint Bucket tool? Or color, say, a bird with, say, an ellipse? Or fill in squiggly lines? Have you even heard of the Behind blend mode? Get this: It fills junk behind stuff.

Okay, so this is a long video (14 min). But somehow it goes by in the blink of an eye. Here's the official description from lynda.com:

In this week's happy, idyllic Deke's Techniques, Deke shows you a range of tips and tricks for coloring a line drawing in Photoshop. Although filling in black outlines on a white background seems like a fairly straightforward task at first glance, there are a lot of ways to inadvertently spill your colors outside their designated areas. Even in a simple drawing like this one, you can see how there might be a lot of nooks and crannies (namely, those squiggles!) to deal with.

Read more »