shapes

Just returned from a fantastic Fourth of July, during which I and my two boys watched the fireworks of the San Francisco Bay from the heights of Angel Island. Wow! And now I'm bound for a few days off-the-grid at Camp Sacramento. Wow!

In between, I thought I'd sneak in a quick post about this week's thrilling episode of Deke's Techniques, in which we take that superhero shield that we created last week in Illustrator and reimagine it in Photoshop.

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

If today's graphic looks like last week's, it because today builds on last week's theme. But the topic is fresh. Today, I show you how to construct rays of soft, blurry, and entirely fabricated light using none other than vector-based shape layers. In Photoshop. With the help of the Polygon tool and the Masks panel. And the Linear Dodge blend mode.

So much sweetness, so little time. Here's the official description from lynda.com: Read more » 

Today's free movie examines a masking technique. And for once, we won't be using the image to select itself. After all, this is a light bulb, with fragile, translucent edges and very little in the way of color or luminance to set it apart from its background. Happily, it's man-made (gender-neutral, could be woman-made, don't give a crap), so its edges are entirely geometric, as if created with a French curve, protractor, and abacus. By candlelight.

In such situations, your ally is the Paths panel. Most folks associate paths with the Pen tool. Which makes sense. You can draw paths with the Pen tool, but let's be honest: Even if you love the Pen, it has a sharp point that will, on a regular and unfailing basis, poke you in the butt. (Meaning that it's not always that fun to use.) The better solution: Trace your object with a few dozen ellipses, circles, and rectangles. After all, whether you're tracing an old-school light bulb or a new-school smart phone, ellipses, circles, and rectangles are what our wonderful world of glamorous gadgets are made from.

Here's the official description from lynda.com (which includes many more colons): Read more » 

Hey gang. This week's Deke's Techniques videos are all about adding text and shapes to a 3D stereoscopic photograph, like the one created in last week's technique. In today's free movie, I show you how to add text and shapes at different planes of depth. In the follow-up video at lynda.com, I show you how to tilt the text and shapes so they incline in 3D space toward the viewer.

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

As powerful as Photoshop is, there is little about the program that is obvious. Case in point: How do you rotate a layer? Right-click on it and select Rotate? Choose Rotate from the Layer menu? Click on the rotate tool? The answer is no, no, and no. Fortunately, there’s the Free Transform command, which lets you not just rotate but also scale, slant, and distort a layer in one continuous operation. Edt > Free Transform is one of Photoshop's most fundamental commands, with a keyboard shortcut to prove it: Ctrl+T (Cmd-T on the Mac). Read more »