Fundamentals

Thursday, May 17th, marked the completion of my next video course for lynda.com, Illustrator CS6 One-on-One: Fundamentals. It will include all sorts of exciting and monumentally educational live-action introductions (replete with graphic overlays) as well as scads of screen casts in which I demonstrate how the most elemental facets of this amazing program work. Not to mention how you work with it.

For example, in Chapter 6, "Tracing an Image" (in which I explore CS6's new Image Trace panel), I show you how to take a scanned Sharpie drawing of a half of an insect (how much more pedestrian could that be?) and turn it into the fully realized butterfly pictured below. Entirely auto-traced. And thus transformed from a murky quagmire of pixels to the resolution-independent vector-based realm of Illustrator CS6.

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As of the posting of this article, you have 24 hours left to download the free public beta of Photoshop CS6. So if you haven't installed it yet, drop everything you're doing and start downloading!

To acquaint yourself with the new features, check out my free Photoshop CS6 Beta Preview course at lynda.com.

And if you're ready for the deep dive, check out Photoshop CS6 One-on-One: Fundamentals, the first in what will be a four-course video series on every single aspect of Photoshop CS6, presented in the order you need to learn it. This and other of my courses will appear every four to six weeks on lynda.com. Read more » 

Just a note to let you know that I've begun work on my next video course for lynda.com, which will be called Photoshop Masking & Compositing: Fundamentals. The course is slated to be 9 chapters long, and it will set in motion the stuff that you need to know to mask a photographic image with absolute authority against any and all backgrounds. Many courses will follow, including (but not limited to): Advanced Blending, The Pen Tool, and the ever-thrilling Hair. The last of which will include "tough stuff"!

At Photoshop World, I had many folks come up to me and tell me that my two back-to-back Channels & Masks sessions were their favorite at the conference. Which was awesome, because those sessions were based on my old content. This next course is a new take on things. Here's how it all starts, with an artificially colored foreground set against a similarly adjusted background. (Based on a Fotolia image from TessarTheTegu, BTW.) It's a wacky multichannel effect. And, really, isn't he just the duckiest toucan you ever laid eyes on? I love how he has pretend teeth to scare off the predators. (That's not Photoshop, that's natural!) Don't you just want to take him home and make bird-love to him? I know, me too.

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Hey gang: First of all, I want you all to know that my Photoshop CS5 Extended One-on-One: 3D courses are riding high and doing well at my beloved video publisher, lynda.com. Taken as a whole, the three courses---3D Fundamentals, 3D Objects, and 3D Scenes---add up to about 20 hours, less than my single (overly long, but I have to say supremely educational) Photoshop One-on-One: Advanced course. And yet, as a group, they are outperforming that title as well as the other 3D courses. Meaning that there are a lot of you interested in the vast and largely untapped realm of 3D in Photoshop.

If I know you---and let's face it, I don't---then you're itching for more. In which case, glad tidings: I'll be presenting much of the first course live at Photoshop World Las Vegas on September 6 of this very year. It'll be a four-hour "pre-con" workshop, which means it'll cost you an extra $89. That gets you not only my charming presence, but also a free DVD of my 3D Fundamentals course, which normally costs roughly as much as you'd pay for a cheap couch at a discount store. So you'll actually save money! (Less than you would if you don't attend, but more than you would if you do. You get what I'm saying, right?) Read more » 

A quick note to let those of you who may be interested know: I just now arrived in Ventura, CA, at the recording studios of my esteemed video publisher lynda.com. Tomorrow I begin work on what promises to be a four-part comprehensive and (more importantly) comprehensible series on 3D in Photoshop, beginning with Photoshop CS5 Extended One-on-One: 3D Fundamentals.

This particular graphic happens to hail from an upcoming Deke's Techniques movie, created in Photoshop CS5 Extended with a little help from Illustrator (as you'll learn in May when that movie goes live). But, hey, it'll do in a pinch.

If you have any 3D trials or tribulations that are troubling you, I invite you to comment here. I'll be working on the various pieces of this series for the next few months, so suggestions are welcome. Read more »