A couple of nights ago, too much traffic knocked the site down for 10 full hours. Which made me ecstatic. Thanks for the chaos!
Meanwhile, the purpose for today’s post is to alert you of ongoing progress made on my CS5 One-on-One video series for lynda.com. First, regarding the Photoshop series (which goes live next week), below is a still from a video that I shot a couple of days ago. I had to rerecord a handful of movies because an image license fell through. So naturally I was working through some anger issues. But as always happens in these cases, the new videos are better than the old ones. Plus they include hand-drawn demos of a few tips and tricks, which are new to Photoshop CS5. The image below documents how to resize and adjust the hardness of a brush on-the-fly, if only you can interpret it.
Oh, and did I mention Photoshop CS5’s revamped sharpen tool, once the worst tool in the program, now produces halfway decent results? Check it out.
Meanwhile, Friday morning at 3:26am, I finished the last of my Illustrator CS5 One-on-One videos. Which was a big thing for me because the series includes nearly 250 movies, my personal best/longest. But the amazing thing is, I managed to put together a series that: A) gets you into Illustrator with your feets running in record time, and B) shows you how to be a vector artist even if you’ve never been an artist in your life. I know, such promises are dangerous, but I believe they’re also true.
We start out tentatively by drawing an arrow entering a heart, using Illustrator’s most basic line tools. The heart is all arc and arrow tool, btw.
Later, I invite you to draw a tree using nothing more the a series of lines and blobs and Pathfinder operations. (With some clever tricks, of course.) And it manifests into the illustration below. Seriously, you’ll draw this from scratch.
It all ends with you seizing complete and total mastery over the pen tool. In fact, you ultimately award yourself with a certificate, suitable for framing. It’s like that scene at the at end of “The Wizard of Oz,” except that you (not the Tin Woodman, you) receive the semi-meaningless certificate of authenticity, with an Aztec crocodile god on it.
Did I mention it’s all new stuff? With new exercises and project files around every bend and turn? One-on-One is not just about helping you master the software, it’s also about you mastering the art. We’re kickin’ it up a few notches, babies.
Eh, shucks
I see I already posted the Aztec-crocodile-god (Cipactli) certificate. Too much video training makes Deke an addled boy. But really, is there such a thing as too many Aztec crocodile gods (Cipactli)? Answer: heck no (Cipactli).
Don’t make the crocodile god angry Deke….
or you’ll suffer the consequences… it’ll bite your brush and jump in a death roll with it, messing all your work!
BEWARE OF THE CROC!!!!
Basic Print Out Magazine for CS5
Some instructional videos are to catchy to watch. . . why will they not just print a basic guide to CS5?
Thanks
Photoshop
I have had used several versions of Photoshop and really this one is much better and I guess videos were better but it is much effective if they provide such modules, right? We been hooked up with some features of this program but then if there’s one thing that I just want to edit that would be Annette Edwards. For the sake of those who doesn’t know her, Annette Edwards was a woman whom spent around $16,000 for breast lifts and face implants to achieve the cartoon character named Jessica Rabbit, this is somewhat ridiculous but true. These days, looking at her photo you might be a little confuses. Annette’s 4 foot 3 inch rabbit sports this title for the World’s Largest Rabbit, not her. She has an infatuation with Jessica Rabbit, and does indeed what she can to look just like her.
The new DIVIDE blend mode
Is confusing to me, and so far, somewhat disappointing. I was hoping it would act like the John Knoll ‘Unmult’ plugin for After Effects, but apparently not.
http://www.digitalartform.com/archives/2010/05/photoshop_ps5_d.html
I take it back about DIVIDE
It turns out that in the mathematical expression you want the RGB in the numerator and the ALPHA in the denominator, but in Photoshop you want the alpha image in the upper layer.
Then it works.
:)
One last thing about the new DIVIDE blend mode
http://www.digitalartform.com/assets/wildthings.jpg
There is an old use of the divide blend mode from 1983 (pre-Photoshop, obviously) that I know of in the Disney / John Lasseter cg test for a film based on Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LvIDRoO8KnM
It involved drawing shapes with hard lines, blurring them to look like CG, and dividing the blurred shapes by their own masks so that the interiors had nice soft ‘shading’ but the blur didn’t introduce darkness around the edge of every shape because the edges received equal blur and were given the ‘divide’ treatment.
The interior of the masks were white. Anything divided by white (1) is unchanged (left blurry)
The edges were normalized back to their original colors by being divided by the soft masks.
The divide blend mode is written to skip pure black pixels, as division by zero is undefined.
kind of interesting…
Photoshop CS5 One-on-One at Lynda.com
Just dropped by at Lynda.com just in case your new series “may be” released or there is news of it. It’s there to my delight.
Now I just need to dig up 17 hrs worth of undamaged brain cells to load the new info onto.
Thanks for overcoming your image license setback and getting it out this week.
U de Man!
dekekeys for PS5
How do I get the dekekeys to follow your Lynda.com training if I am only a month to month member?
Best Workflow CS5
So Deke, for those of us who are not Premium members of LDC, can you post the Best Workflow CS5 file on deke.com? Or at least tell us what the settings are so we can put them in manually? Thanks. DP
Special effects
Hello Deke. I’m from Brazil (so sorry about my english skills =P) and I just started watching your videos of Illustrator and Photoshop cs4. I must be honest, I downloaded from a torrent site, but if it wasn’t for it, I would never had chance to know your work. I don’t want to create a discussion if it is wrong or not, but now that I know what you can teach me, I wanna support it and buy an annual subscription on Lynda.com. But I don’t know how I can pay for it since we don’t use dollars here in Brazil. But I’ll figure it out. Anyway, I just wanted to tell you that one of the ramifications of photoshop that most people overlook is the casual user, that want to use it for fun. I’ve tried to create some amazing things and its really hard to find someone willing to teach how to use photoshop to create special effects. Simple things like wallpapers and collages. And also digital painting. So please, please and please, if you dont have the knowledge to do such a tutorial, encourage someone who can. I’m eager to learn but we dont have good teachers even in big cities. I can’t afford college in another country, but I can’t express my creativity properly too. Anyway, just thank you for the amazing work. You’re the best teacher I’ve had and I never met you.
P.S.: Don’t worry, I’m saving money to buy an account on Lynda
Illustrator One-on-One
Any news on a possible release date for this Deke???
Nothing against Mordy, but I need Deke as my tutor and hangin in there, waiting to get crackin on CS5.
Illustrator CS5 - The Book?????
Hey Deke,
Remember your Illustrator CS4 One-on-One book got delayed to a CS5 release - is that still going to happen?
Matt
AIcs5 1on1 Findamentals videos
Are due out in the next couple of weeks, I believe.
I’ll look into it . . .
I’m working on the AIcs5 1on1 book right this moment
Or at least I would be if I weren’t writing this reply!
:-)
Still a few months out. But our plan is to nail down a print date in a couple of weeks.
Photoshop CS5 Videos at Lynda.com
Hi, I am a new subscriber and I don’t post on forums very often - so sorry if this is off topic! I have been following your great training courses on Lynda.com, and have finished off all of your excellent Illustrator CS4 videos, and will be investigating your new Illustrator CS5 videos when they arrive. I have just moved onto the Photoshop CS5 Fundamentals course - and as I am nearing completion, was wondering when the rest of the series will be released?
Many thanks for being a great tutor - I wish I had had guys like you teaching me back in my youth!
Many thanks
Tt
Great news, I’ll start
Great news, I’ll start making space for another book on my bookshelf!
8K [every 6 seconds]
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How Could This Possibly..
How could this possibly be worthwhile for you. I mean seriously… Posting totally useless posts on websites where nobody is going to follow up on your scam is insane. What did you get for that post, .25 cents? Way to go - get laid much?
Me,too
Answer, svp? ^_^