Well, free once you get yourself to Las Vegas, baby. But if you are going to be in or around Sin City on September 5th or 6th, come by the O’Reilly booth at Photoshop World and say hi. Print out the attached pass for free entry for two to the expo floor. Although you won’t be able to attend Deke’s world-famous sessions without a full pass (which you can learn about here), there’s plenty to do and learn on the expo floor. (In fact, NAPP, Microsoft, and Nikon all have theaters where many of our friends hold on-the-floor sessions.) Deke will be appearing in the booth for an interview with O’Reilly Evangelist, Derrick Story. (I’ll post the time here once we finalize the schedule.) Although as you know, Deke is quite shy and retiring, he’s also very much in love with his fans. Especially you fabulous people. I’ll be there too, doing my booth duty, so definitely introduce yourself as a beloved inhabitant of dekeVille.
Click on the image below to download the pass. Then print. Then come. If it could be simpler, let us know.
Potential new header dekeHELP
Hi Deke,
Love your style (have both books and DVD’s of yours) ~ guess what? I’ve even learnt a thing or two!
Have I done enough grovelling to slip in a request?
1’ve been playing with pictures out of their frames and mostly (with a little shadow trouble) they have gone OK. (Particularly pleased with a Giraffe drinking from the picture underneath it.) One I have is a wedding outfit with the train trailing over the grass, out of the frame and across the background. Great but HOW THE HECK do I cut the grass from under the train (outside the frame) to let the background show through without destroying the lace as well :-(
What would be cool would be a web site (its a 60Mb PST so a bit big for e-mail) where we could drop problems (so some text needed then to say what we want to achieve) and someone smarter than me (99% of the world then) could pick it up and post a mini tutorial on the solution (I want learning here, not simply a “fix-it”).
You could perhaps cherry pick the best solutions for a dekeHELP slot (with a searchable index) ~ and even have some new photo challenges to fill your copious free time!
Regards Paul
I like the idea
Of a dekeHelp section. For plain old bandwidth reasons, I don’t think we’ll be implementing anything like that before the year is out, but we’ve been batting around the idea of crafting a forum, and I think your title is spot on.
It sounds like you’re struggling with the grass blades cutting into the lace? (Or showing thru the lace?)
If it’s strictly an edge issue, then one of three solutions: 1) Use the pen tool to draw a smooth edge that extends to where the lace would end if it were set against some other background and then clone the lace into the missing area (a fair amount of work but can be done), or 2) use the pen tool to cut away the lace that’s interrupted by the grass, or 3) some combo of the two.
If you want to extract the grass from behind the lace, wow, that’s going to be tough. I document some blue-screen/green-screen techniques in my masking series for lynda,com, which would work if the grass were uniformly green and relatively flat in terms of luminance. More likely, tho, the grass drifts into yellow with all sorts of luminance variations, which makes automation unlikely.
Sounds like an interesting exercise.