portrait

Anyone who knows the ins and outs of the printing business is familiar with halftone dots. Viewed up close, you see the colored dots; viewed from a distance, the dots resolve into a continuous-tone image. This week, I take on something similar. Only instead of dots, I substitute characters of text. Viewed up close, you see letters. Viewed from a distance---or merely, as a whole---the letters resolve into a photograph. Either way, the text remains legible as text.

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

Hey, gang. Today marks the second of my two-part work of hardscrabble investigative journalism into what makes Halloween so dag-gum scary, graphics-wise. Last week, I showed you how to make Scareflakes. (Wow, was that terrifying or what?) This week, I show you how to begin the process of turning the near-dead living into the living dead. It starts with a faux-HDR technique that relies on The Lab Mode. How's that for Halloween irony? Whatever, here's a before-and-after comparison, submitted for your approval:

I'd love to explore it with you in more detail, but the official description from lynda.com tells it all: 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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Today's technique is all about mapping a couple of textures onto a portrait photograph. The textures in question happen to be a bit of alabaster and a travertine tile (the images hail from the Fotolia image library), but they could be anything. And it's all accomplished using Photoshop's advanced blending options. Read more » 

This week's movie says goodbye to the text effects and hello to photography techniques. Specifically, I show you a quick method for smoothing over skin details in a portrait shot. I start by inverting a layer of High Pass to "unsharpen" the image. (Credit Katrin Eismann for suggesting this trick to me in Martini Hour 059, "In Which We Attempt 20 Photoshop Tips in One Martini Hour.") For my tastes, that results in too much smoothing. So I set the High Pass layer inside an anti-edge mask of my own design. Read more »