dekeBlog

My dear dekeRastinators. It's February: the shortest month of the year. So say goodbye to the luxuriously lofty goals of January, and let's get practical. I'm here to talk about Photoshop shortcuts. For some of you, that means: "Ugh, maybe there's a Quora thread full of other people talking about why they hate learning shortcuts that would be a better use of my time." 

But before you run off, let me tell you a little story: the first time I read a Deke McClelland Photoshop One-on-One book, I was the newly assigned editor for the CS2 update to the original. I was also newly exposed to Photoshop. Now, never let it be said I didn't love Deke from the outset, but I was not as initially fond of his insistance on trying to teach me shortcuts for commands I had only just been introduced to seconds before. My brain wanted to assimilate the how and why of doing something before it allocated neurons to memorizing how to do said thing more efficiently. 

But sometime around the, oh, 37th time I repeated the same set of tedious mouse movements to move a selection to an appropriately named new layer, I started understanding I could use a little more Ctrl+Alt+J in my life. Make that Command-Option-J, because I was trying to switch to a Mac as well. (That's a lotta new stuff, no wonder my patience was thin.) 

Point is, when you encounter Photoshop tutorial sites with well-meaning articles on "The Best 27 Photoshop Keyboard Shortcuts You'll Definitely Want To Stop and Learn Right This Minute," it's hard to make the connection between shortcut-learning and true efficiency. So, Deke and I, based on our own personal and totally biased experience, have come up with five of our favorite time-saving shortcuts that we think are worth the time consider memorizing, saving your creative concentration and exposure to Repetitive Mouse Injury for things that you may do less often.

Read on for how and (of course) why these Photoshop keyboard shortcuts made our list:  Read more » 

My beloved dekeOmaniacs: Of late, I have been asked to weigh in on my favorite of the almost-200 episodes of Deke's Techniques. Now, I pride myself on a) being an excellent judge of useful information, b) having mad curation skills, and c) being notoriously defensive of my own damn opinion. (Yes, I'm aware that these all might be the same thing.) 

But Deke has been asked to speak at a couple of very cool conferences this Spring (the Print and ePub Conference and Adobe MAX), and he's been specifically requested to share the awesome that is Deke's Techniques. So it has come to light that we might want to identify those techniques that would best benefit from a live performance thereof. Thus I bring you: 

What follows are links to my favorite episodes based on the criteria of ingenuity, usefulness, and visual appeal (plus the reality-TV-esque challenge of Deke attempting to explain them in person within his given time limit).

But let's face it, most of you are way further entrenched in day-to-day application of your Photoshop and Illustrator skills. (I, meanwhile, get paid mostly to apply my scathing wit, wordsmithery, curation skillz, and barely suppressed ego.) 

And please, for the love of awesomeness, share your favorites in the comments. Note: You can see the entire collection of Deke's Techniques at lynda.com, and if your'e not a member you can get a free trial at lynda.com/deke. 

To get you started, here are my nominees and reasons for nominating them: Read more » 

Oh goodness gravy, I have been remiss. Last Thursday, my newest video course, Illustrator CS6 One-on-One: Advanced, hit the virtual shelves of the lynda.com Online Training Library. And it's been the talk of the town. If you imagine this site is the town. And I'm the only one talking. But it's been popular so perhaps you'll want to listen up, even if I'm just yackin' up my own junk.

The course is 11 hours and 2 minutes long. Exactly 6 minutes shorter than my previous course, Illustrator CS6 One-on-One; Intermediate. Which makes it precisely 0.6% more powerful. (I did the math!) Please allow me to share my favorite three sample files from this inspiring and ultra-long but ultra-inspiring course.

Starting with, are you familiar with the concept of color harmonies? They play an essential role in the behavior of the exceedingly useful Color Guide panel and Recolor Artwork command. If this is news to you, check out Chapter 25, "The Color Guide Panel." Specifically the movie called "The 23 color harmony rules, diagrammed." In which I show you how each of the color harmonies works, in a real Lab color wheel so you can't help but understand, as pictured below:

Read more » 

Just returned home from a long day at the office. And, boy, am I psyched.

First, my Illustrator CS6 One-on-One: Advanced course goes live at my beloved video publisher lynda.com tomorrow. It will include, among other things, the following neon type effect created entirely from scratch using Illustrator combined with just a small dash of Photoshop. Working together as never witnessed before in the history of mankind.

I'm so taken with it, I might feature it in a future episode of Deke's Techniques.

Speaking of which, second, I recorded a crazy number of Deke's Techniques movies just this very day. (Technically yesterday, but whatever. I'm still awake.) All of 8, which is amazing, given that I usually record on average about 2. They're really hard! Anyway, as a result, you have this collection of Andy Warhol-style silkscreen-like variations to look forward to:

I plan to call it Andy Warhol taught everyone nothing.

I know, I've explored Warhol treatments in the past. But while that was funny, this is better. I'll get back to you later on everything. Read more » 

That's right, Part 2 of my cradle-to-grave video treatise on Adobe Illustrator CS6 is out on lynda.com. I would have mentioned it 2 weeks ago, on November 21, when the course went live. But I was on vacation in Ireland. In the northern city of Derry, to be exact. And while Colleen was blogging every day, and I was making her graphics, it seemed somehow antithetical to the whole vacationing thing for me to mention my for-profit course. You know what I mean?

But I'm home now. And I've even sneaked in a couple of days of legitimate work. So what the hell, time to blog the course. That image below, that's a Venn diagram bear. He's not a dog, he's a bear. Perhaps a bit over-eager. But still, he's a bear.

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