Fotolia

Upon reviewing this week's technique, I regard it as entirely sound and junk. But I fear it may ask as many questions than it answers. Which is the purpose of art, after all.

In this free video, I show you how to create a seamlessly repeating tile pattern in Photoshop. Which involves as many applications of the Offset filter as it requires leaps of logic. It's all there, but even I had to pause the movie a couple of times and shake the cobwebs out of my head. And I recorded the damn thing! Which just goes to show you . . . not sure what. Read more » 

It's been nearly a month since my last artistic adventure in Deke's Techniques. (I'm thinking of DTs 012: "Creating a High Key, High Contrast Effect.") And so I reckon it's time for another one. In fact, I have two for you. Visitors to this site can watch me turn a photographic image into a faux pen-and-ink drawing. And members of lynda.com can watch a second video in which I turn the same image into a pencil sketch.

Here's the description from high atop Central Headquarters L-dot-C:

For this week's free Photoshop technique, Deke McClelland takes an ordinary portrait shot, applies several filters (two of which he claims to never use under any other circumstances), and transforms the photo into an "ink drawing." By way of Gaussian Blur, Smart Blur (there's one), High Pass, Notepaper (there's the other), and yet more Gaussian blur, you'll learn how to take a photo like the one on the left and achieve a pen-on-paper effect like the one on the right.

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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 » 

This week's 7-minute video shows you how to isolate the highlights and shadows from one image and blend them with those of another. It's quick, it's easy, it's effective. Read more » 

This week, I and my beloved video publisher lynda.com have a special treat for you: I show you how to create a galaxy of stars, solar flare, and space gas from nothing more than a layer of black pixels. And you can customize it for print, for the web, whatever you want. In just 9 minutes and 1 extra-quick second, you can Big Bang in Photoshop. Read more »