Liquify

The Liquify filter is one of Photoshop's great destructive retouching tools. (Of which we'll see more before this countdown is out.) Meaning that it permanently modifies pixels--no fancy parametric adjustments for this one!--in the name of making the subject of your photograph look her or his best.

Notice that I positioned the feminine pronoun first; that was not by accident. These days, Liquify is used to tweak virtually every professional glamor shot on the planet. It is, in fact, the Auto-Tune of professional portrait photography. So much so that, during a presentation by a notorious photographer and retoucher, an equally notorious female colleague of mine leaned over and whispered, "If he takes one more anorexic model and turns her into a stick figure, I'm going to go up there and kick him in the f*cking nuts." Read more » 

dekePod Episode 016: Hello, friend. Let's you and I get all collegiate and stuff and engage in some intellectually stimulating free-word association.

For example, I say High Renaissance. You say, Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael. Very good!

But you're not done. You say, an unrivaled time of creative energy and unabashedly accurate representation of the human form. Ooh, I like that, keep it coming. The advent of secular humanism, say you, The rebirth of Classical Ideas! Read more » 

dekePod Episode 010: I love this time of year. The crisp breeze on my back. The slight shiver. The smell of the new season.

It's nature's way of telling us to stock up. To fatten ourselves for the hard times ahead, when the ground is frozen and the crops are dead or bare. Only problem is, most of us don't have no stinkin' crops and the frozen foods aisle is as overflowing in December as it is in June. So every Holiday Season marks the introduction of a couple of new pounds that never seem to leave.

But what if this year was different? What if all photographic evidence pointed to a thinner you at the end of 2008? Let dekePod show you how. Here's the official marketing description: Read more »