In this week’s free technique, Deke uses a variety of Photoshop effects to turn a couple of unsuspecting rental car agents from this world into rental car agents from a galaxy far, far away. The eerie Star Wars hologram effect made famous by Princess Leia can work nicely on everyday substantive earthlings with the right combination of a custom pattern, a Displacement Map, and some choice layer effects. Imagine if your next rental car included the two regular people (on left) waiting virtually (on right) to acclimate you to the cool, but unfamiliar, controls of your strange vehicle.
The effect starts by saturating an ordinary pair of humans with some old-school, horizontal TV static via the application of a simple custom pattern (Deke shows you how to make the pattern in the free video). Then the shadows of the humans are given faux-holographic substance via the application of a Displacement Map. To finish the effect, Deke applies a few layer effects and shows you how to customize your holograph based on whether it’ll appear digitally or in print.
On the note of cool but unfamiliar controls, you may notice that in this week’s Deke’s Techniques movie Deke is using the new dark user-interface brought to you by Photoshop CS6. While Deke’s technique will work just fine in CS5, if you’d like to try Photoshop CS6 and experience the dark interface for yourself, you can download the free Photoshop CS6 public beta for a limited time from Adobe Labs. After you have the CS6 beta, if you’d like to hear more about how it works, lynda.com has made Deke’sPhotoshop CS6 Beta Preview course free to everyone for a limited time as well.
Now that you have the power to hologram yourself into any setting with Photoshop, where will you go first?
Today, Adobe made a beta version of Photoshop CS6 available to everyone, providing an opportunity for you to download and check out the new version of the application for free. The CS6 version of Photoshop includes mammoth updates to the program, and to make sure you get the most from your free test-drive, lynda.com has made our new Photoshop CS6 Beta Preview course, authored by Deke McClelland, completely free to everyone today as well.
Photoshop is used for a myriad of creative endeavors, whether it be editing, manipulating, enhancing, or even creating images from scratch. This Photoshop update has something for everyone from photographers, to print, web, and interaction designers, to video and 3D artists. The list of new features is impressive, bordering on overwhelming. Which new feature will be the most significant for you? Depends on your point of view. To help you decide where to look first during this free trial period, I quizzed some of the lynda.com resident Photoshop experts for their initial reactions:
Justin Seeley, lynda.com staff author: “My favorite new feature is the auto-saving. Photoshop CS6 automatically saves a temporary file as you work, so that if the program crashes, you can recover easily. This will be killer for new and old users alike. I’m always flooded with emails from people asking if I know any magic trick to recover unsaved work they’ve lost in a power outage or software crash. Now they don’t have to endure that!”
Michael Ninness, lynda.com VP of Product and Content, and veteran lynda.com author: “I’d say I am most interested in all the changes they’ve made to the Shape tools attempting to provide a real object-based design metaphor.”
If you’d like to see what Michael is talking about in action, check out this video:
Nigel French, author of the lynda.com Photoshop for Designers series: “Loving the new Camera RAW process. The new sliders make more sense and the results are discernibly better than previous versions. The improvements to the Graduated Filter are especially welcomed.”
James Fritz, content manager for the Design segment at lynda.com: “As a designer, I am happy to see that with the release of Photoshop CS6 graphic designers are finally getting some love. With the addition of new vector layers and layer filtering, comping up web sites, posters, and other complicated designs is easier than ever. As usually is the case, the little ‘just do it’ updates have my favorite new feature—the ability to insert Lorum Ipsum text.”
Deke McClelland, lynda.com author of the free Photoshop CS6 Beta Preview course and Photoshop One-on-One series: “Content-Aware Move, which allows you to select an object in your image and move it somewhere else while filling in the old background works extremely well. You’ll still need to have the refinement features at the ready, but Content-Aware Move gets you most of the way there.”
Chris Orwig, lynda.com author of the Photoshop for Photographers series: “I’m concentrating on the features that are particularly useful for photographers, namely the Lighting Effects Gallery, the redefined Crop tool, the Blur gallery, the redesigned Print dialog box, and the improvements to Adobe Camera Raw.”
Ben Long, author of the lynda.com Foundations of Photography series: “The Blur Gallery is cool. In general, if I want shallow depth of field (one of the things the Blur Gallery lets you simulate) I prefer to get it by using a fast lens and a wide aperture. But if I don’t have a fast lens with me—or if decide that I’d like a shot to have shallower depth of field than what I originally captured—it’s nice to have the option. I’ve also found that the Blur Gallery delivers better results than third-party plug-ins that provide similar features.”
Jim Heid, content manager for the lynda.com Photography segment: “It isn’t as glitzy as the Blur Gallery, but Photoshop CS6′s revamped Crop tool is one of those improvements that will make my photographic life better. One Crop tool enhancement in particular stands out: the tool is non-destructive. If you change your mind about a crop after you’ve been working on an image, just activate the Crop tool again and recrop. Unlike previous Photoshop versions, CS6 doesn’t discard pixels that you cropped out. It’s a bit more analogous to how cropping works in Lightroom, and it gives you more freedom to experiment.”
Not surprisingly the new dark interface that you saw in the first video is the most obvious change and the one mentioned most often by our esteemed panel. By default Photoshop CS6 will use a dark gray interface, providing a vastly different look from previous versions. You can of course change back to a more familiar lighter interface by resetting the preferences, as Nigel did: “The first thing I did when I got the beta was make the interface look like what I was used to. But upon reflection, and with some time to get acclimatized, I like the new, lean, mean dark interface.” Deke, who has been using the light interface for over 20 years notes, “Surprisingly, I’m finding the dark interface my preference. It’s much less distracting, and lets me focus on just the image at hand.”
If your interest in the new Photoshop is piqued, you can download the beta for free from Adobe and pair it up with our free Photoshop CS6 Beta Preview course. For further exploration, in the coming months, lynda.com will also be creating new courses that provide in-depth, specific information on Photoshop CS6, from a variety of perspectives.
Let us know in the comment section here what you think of the new Photoshop CS6 beta, and what Photoshop CS6 features you are most interested in learning about in greater depth.
It’s time to upgrade your Photoshop weather machine with this week’s free technique from Deke. Back in November, Deke showed you how to create a synthetic rainbow entirely out of Photoshop magic. In this week’s free tutorial, Deke shows you how to intensify your dark and stormy scenes by adding a 100-percent artificial, but no less striking bolt of Photoshop-based lightning.
Start by simply painting in a black lightning-shaped brush stroke. Then, by ingeniously selecting parts of your bolt, you’ll apply the Difference Clouds filter to randomize the edges, and an unusual Levels command setting to convert that blobby line into a tendril of light. Then, with some carefully applied Blend modes, some Gradient masks, and a hint of brushed-in contact spots for eerie glow, you’ll finish up your truly believable lightning effect.
The entire procedure takes some concentration and diligence, but in the end you’ll be rewarded with a flash of creative control, and ready to illuminate any scene with this high-impact effect.
And if that doesn’t satisfy your desire to control the elements, Deke’s got an exclusive members-only movie this week called Creating a driving rain effect in Photoshop, in which he, you guessed it, shows you how to create driving rain.
Photoshop weather at your fingertips, all courtesy of your benevolent meteorologist Deke.
See you back next week with another free technique from Deke!
Interested in more?
• The entire Deke’s Techniques collection on lynda.com (updated weekly)
• Courses by Deke McClelland on lynda.com
• All Photoshop courses on lynda.com
In this week’s free movie, Deke shows you how to create a perfectly spaced frame around a graphic inside your Photoshop file. Now, at first glance, this may seem rather simple, especially for those of you who have mastered adding drop shadows. But the real key to this effect is a rather ingenious use of Photoshop’s ability to contract a selection uniformly in order to create the boundaries of the frame. To do this, start with a selection based on the size of the graphic you want to frame, use the Select > Modify > Contract command to shrink your selection to the exact size you want the width of your frame to be, then invert your selection, and voila you have a perfectly sized frame around the graphic. No measuring or calculations necessary.
Once you’ve created the frame layer this way, it’s then a relatively simple matter of applying the right layer effects to sell the overall idea. In Deke’s demonstration, he applies nuanced measures of the aforementioned Drop Shadow, plus the Color Overlay, Bevel and Emboss, and Outer Glow effects. The result is an organic frame that’s integrated into your image, using a technique that has plenty of room for personal customization. In fact, I played with the technique myself this week, and using a text layer as my graphic I was able to create a birthday card for a certain application who’s about to turn 25. (See next week’s technique for more information there.)
For members of lynda.com, there’s an exclusive movie this week (Adding a frame to a photograph) in which Deke shows you how to frame a photograph, making sure the boundaries of the frame are exactly those of the original image.
Stay tuned next week for another free technique which features Deke’s own birthday homage to Adobe Illustrator.
Today’s technique shows how to create a dual-focus hybrid image. In human speak, that means Deke documents how to create an optical illusion that makes a photo looks like one thing from a distance (an adult lion) and another close up (a lion cub). The trick is to create an image that contains both high-frequency (close up) and low-frequency (far away) data, so that the image changes based on your visual distance.
When I suggested to Deke that we call this movie, “How to make an optical illusion,” Deke’s response was, “Everything about Photoshop is an optical illusion.
You may be familiar with this effect if you’ve encountered the Albert Einstein Marilyn Monroe image in your Internet wandering. In Deke’s lion example, he applies Photoshop’s High Pass filter to a photo of a lion cub, ensuring that the high-frequency data sears that particular image in your mind, but he also applies the Gaussian Blur filter to the adult lion, so that if you back up (or squint), you’ll see the image of an adult lion in the same photo. In the below images, the high frequency is shown above and the low frequency is shown below, but these are actually different optical distances of the very same image:
If you’re intrigued by the mysteries of hybrid images, Deke has another lynda.com member-exclusive technique this week where he explains how to add text to a hybrid composition.
See you back next Tuesday with another technique from Deke!
In this week’s InDesign Secrets episode, David Blatner reveals how you can leverage Photoshop layer features to provide more immediate flexibility in your InDesign layouts. Using layers in Photoshop is a great way to keep your options open, and the Layers Comp feature allows you to experiment quickly with different combinations of those options. In this free movie, David shows you how you can retain the flexibility of Photoshop layers even after you’ve placed the Photoshop document into your InDesign file.
For example, let’s say David wanted to retaliate for Anne-Marie Concepcion using an image of his head to demonstrate how to add images to a stroke in a previous InDesign Secrets video. He might decide to design the cover of a tell-all book that features a compromising photo of Anne-Marie. By placing a single Photoshop file in InDesign, he retains all three choices and could decide to:
a) give Anne-Marie a charming butterfly barrette created with a Photoshop shape layer:
b) Colorize Anne-Marie to a lovely shade of InDesign magenta via a Photoshop Hue/Saturation layer:
Or c) both:
Regardless, once the Photoshop file is placed, all of David’s revenge options can be accessed from within InDesign.
Over in the Online Training Library®, the forgiving Anne-Marie has another InDesign secret exclusively for members of lynda.com titled Adding custom HTML tags to EPUB/HTML export. In this video she discusses how the new InDesign CS5.5 feature that allows you to map your InDesign styles to CSS tags works. (Yet another reason to practice style-creation in InDesign!)
Anne-Marie and David will be back in two weeks with more InDesign Secrets. (And who knows what their revenge may be on me.)
You’ve probably been there. You’re working with a high-contrast photo or composition, with lots of lights and darks, and it’s your job to lay text over it. Readable text. So, do you choose dark text or light? Either one risks becoming unreadable when it hits an object behind it that doesn’t provide enough contrast. And please, whatever you do, don’t compromise with that medium gray text that’s completely unsatisfying no matter where it lands.
Enter this week’s free technique from Deke that shows you how to conveniently set up your type so that it automatically inverts everything behind it. By setting up your text this way, you no longer have to make the compromised choice to leave the text in some state of questionable readability, or the tedious choice to stop and manually reset text color as you move it around. By using a blend mode and a couple of well-placed adjustment layers to mathematically tell Photoshop what you want it to do when, you’ll create automatically reversing yet entirely editable text.
And for members of the lynda.com Online Training Library®, Deke has an exclusive movie this week, Creating auto-inverting line art, in which he shows you how to do the same inverse effect with line art (in this case a signature). The steps in this technique are similar to those discussed in Deke’s free tutorial, but require you to additionally separate and invert the lines that make up the image.
We’ll be back next week with another free technique from Deke.
This week Deke shares one of his most asked-for techniques, how to turn an ordinary portrait into a line drawing. It seems that when people encounter wonderful photo-realistic line drawings out in the wild, they immediately equate said photo-realism with Photoshop. And, if nature didn’t endow you with the ability to draw, then applying some careful Photoshop effects to a well-chosen photo is indeed the way to go.
In this week’s free movie, you’ll see how to take a photographed portrait, apply the Photocopy filter and then adjust and finesse your drawing with the Levels command, Gaussian Blur, a little hand-work (you’re calling it a “drawing” after all), and finally some advanced layer effects. The result is a technique that can work on any well-defined portrait. For example, check out how this unsuspecting photo booth poser in the upper image can become the proto-Nagel woman you see in the lower image below (while doing some fairly wonderful things to my chalkboard in the process).
For members of lynda.com, Deke has an exclusive movie in the Online Training Library® this week called Adding a crosshatch shading pattern that really sells the illustration effect. By the time you go through Deke’s meticulous steps, you’ll take this dramatic photo on the left and turn it into the deadly (but awesome) line drawing on the right:
See you back next week with another technique from Deke!
It’s all well and good to use Deke’s impeccable masking techniques to meticulously isolate objects—like, say, this week’s car—and set them down on new backgrounds. But the fact is, if you don’t bring the shadow of your object along for the ride, your subject is never going to look like it really belongs there.
That’s why in this week’s free movie Deke shows you how to capture the shadow under an object—like, say, this week’s car—and prepare it for use in any new background. The technique centers around the Calculations command (don’t worry, Photoshop does all the math) and some standard masking clean-up techniques. Check out the difference in these before (plopped down without a shadow) and after (with the shadow intact) images:
Don’t leave your transported objects floating out in space, ground them in reality by including their shadows.
See you back next week with another Deke’s Techniques!
It’s not often you hear Deke advocating the use of Photoshop’s artistic filters in his in-depth training. The effects of these filters—with creatively evocative names like Watercolor, Rough Pastel, and Fresco—often fail to yield actual results that live up to the promise of their poetic names. But in this week’s free Deke’s Techniques video you’ll see how to combine the Stained Glass filter with a little bit of Deke-tweak to turn last week’s delicate hummingbird project into an even more fragile stained-glass ornament, complete with the beveled lead and translucent color variations you’d find in the real thing. (Real stained glass, not real hummingbirds.)
Deke starts by temporarily moving the mask to another layer, applying the filter, then moving the mask back to create a strong outline around the subject. Along the way, he explains why setting the Light Intensity slider to zero is the best way to go when you’re using the Stained Glass filter and how preserving the mask will allow you to refine the edges around your ornament. You’ll also see how leveraging Smart Objects, and holding your breath as you temporarily wipe out the bird altogether, will allow you to capture the outlines between your glass pieces, change them to an appropriate lead color, and apply a Bevel and Emboss effect that really sells the technique. Add a string, and you’ll have this delightful ornament hanging from your virtual window:
For lynda.com members, Deke also has an exclusive video in the Online Training Library® this week (Designing a stained-glass window) in which he makes the glass hummingbird part of a larger stained-glass project, complete with cracked glass.
With these techniques at your disposal, you’ll undoubtedly start “stained-glassifying” all kinds of festive objects in your holiday-themed creative compositions.
Note: After almost a year of weekly installments, Deke will be taking a well-deserved holiday next week, but we’ll be back in 2012 with more Deke’s Techniques.
