lovely

After 19 days on the road, sleeping in a total of 11 bedrooms---some safely ensconced within swanky hotels, others boorishly meandering among ordinary pit stops---I have just this moment returned to the sweet embrace of my hometown (and townhome in) Boulder, Colorado.

Which means it's time for me to get serious and shift my focus from enjoying the holidays to preparing for them. Hence this week's movie, "The Panic Button," as best summed up by the official description prepared so eloquently by lynda.com:

In this week's free Deke's Techniques, Deke takes the beautifully glowing jewel that he created last week and turns it into a beautifully glowing Panic button. Because this time of year, if you're going to freak out, you want to (at the very least) do so in a pretty and decorative way.

Deke begins this project where we left off last week, with the glowing cabochon that he created out of pure Photoshop pixels, vectors, and effects. Because few people wear Panic buttons around their necks---although, perhaps, that would be handy---the first step is to turn off the Gold Necklace layer. The result is that last week's glimmering jewel becomes a standalone button:

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Today, three things: First, I'm newly back from Ireland, which was nothing short of astonishingly crazy awesome. Second, as I write this, we have exactly 50,000 members of dekeOnline. (I know, what are the chances of such a round number? But there it is on the big Member-O-Meter.) And third, I greet you this Tuesday as I do every Tuesday with a new episode of Deke's Techniques.

What is it about? I'd love to tell you, but I wasted my introductory paragraph on that other garbage. But just so you're not left hanging, here's the official description from my video publisher, lynda.com:

This week's free episode of Deke's Techniques documents one of those delightful projects in which Deke manages to create something precious, in this case a rounded shimmering jewel, completely from scratch inside Photoshop. He starts with nothing more than the plain black ellipse you see on the left (below) and builds the glowing amber cabochon on the right using little more than a collection of layer effects, not to mention a suitable background of marble and a gold chain.

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Hey Gang. Today I make up for my outrageous post from last week with a classic retouching technique. One in which I take a photograph of a lovely woman and make her skin look wonderfully, reasonably, and altogether realistically smooth.

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