This week’s Deke’s Techniques tutorial demonstrates how to take an otherwise land-locked model and make her appear to emerge from water. The key to this deceptively simple technique is to create a properly aligned, reflected version of the model’s image, that is based on a common smart object so that any changes to the original are reflected in the duplicate.
After you flip the duplicate upside down, your first step is to create a soft transition between the two images. In this video, Deke shows you how to set up a gradient transition in the intersection between the rightside-up and upside-down versions, so that no seams are visible between the two. Once you reduce the opacity of the reflection and add a water layer (adjusted to taste with a color overlay), you’ll arrive at the refreshing effect on the left below.
To make the properly wavy reflection on the right above, members of lynda.com can watch this week’s exclusive movie titled in which Deke shows you how to create a progressive ripple pattern that you can use for any Photoshop image.
See you back here next week when Deke will return with another versatile, reflective technique.
For this week’s featured five new tutorials, I have a sampling of movies from five different Photoshop courses we offer in the lynda.com library, each with a slightly different approach, scope, or focus. With the announcement of CS6, we’ve updated three of our mainstay Photoshop training courses, and when you combine that with our existing content, it can be overwhelming if you don’t know where to start or which course is right for your needs. Here are some quick descriptions and free movie samples of five of our Photoshop offerings, from the encyclopedic to the specific, to help you figure out which one is right for you in your current state of expertise and interest.
Are you looking for more direction on where to start with Photoshop? Let us know what you’re looking to accomplish below in the comments section, and we’ll share our ideas about where to begin.
1. Photoshop CS6 Essential Training In general, Essential Training courses at lynda.com are designed to give you comprehensive knowledge of a software application and a solid foundational overview of the product from a real-world perspective. In the case of Photoshop CS6 Essential Training, this means author Julieanne Kost stays focused on the most important tools for photo editing and compositing, with just the right pairing of ‘how does this tool work’ and ‘why you want to use it and when.’ Essential Training courses are great for watching start-to-finish for the big overview, or if you need focused instruction on a tool, or set of tools, you don’t quite understand. For example, in this excerpt, you’ll see how Photoshop’s Liquify tool can be used judiciously in a variety of different real-world portrait retouching scenarios:
Note, if you’re working with an earlier version of Photoshop, there are Photoshop CS5 and CS4 essential training courses available in the library as well.
2. Photoshop CS6 One-on-One: Fundamentals
The fundamentals course from the Photoshop One-on-One series also covers the core concepts of working in Photoshop, but veteran Photoshop instructor Deke McClelland approaches his training as though he were your private one-to-one tutor. Photoshop CS6 One-on-One: Fundamentals is great if you’re looking for more insight into how tools integrate with one another, or if you prefer to learn through “mini-project” examples that develop over the course of a movie or a chapter. In this excerpt from chapter four of the course, you’ll see a six-minute lesson on blending, and, specifically, how to work with three distinct features: Opacity, the History panel, and blend modes:
Deke has been creating a version of the One-on-One Fundamentals course in the lynda.com library for several years, so if you’re working with an earlier version you can find this specifically tailored instruction for Photoshop CS3, CS4, and CS5 as well.
3. Photoshop CS6 for Photographers
Using Photoshop can mean different things to different people and this course is notable for it’s focus on the needs of a particular set of Photoshop students—photographers. In this course, Chris Orwig, a noted photographer and photography teacher, details the features and techniques surrounding photo enhancement and retouching, preparation for print and online publishing, and much more. He also teaches some of the foundational science behind digital photography, including this discussion of pixels and bit depth:
4. Photoshop for Designers
In the Photoshop for Designers series, talented designer Nigel French digs deep into Photoshop with a specific focus on the needs of graphic designers. The series is broken up into five full-length courses, each exploring a particular aspect of Photoshop including textures, colors, type essentials, Shape layers, and layer effects. Often, when you’re using Photoshop for graphic design, you’re starting with a blank canvas and creating artwork out of pure pixels, which is the case in this excerpt from chapter one of the Photoshop for Designers: Color course which covers how to create a color wheel using Photoshop’s blend modes and layer effects.
5. Photo Restoration with Photoshop
In this course, professional photo restorer Janine Smith describes how to use Photoshop specifically to restore, retouch, and enhance old or damaged photos. In addition to covering methods for fixing everything from exposure, to stains, colorcast, scratches, and tears, Janine also shares how to evaluate damaged photos before beginning the restoration process. A course that offers lessons through exploration of an example project, this course includes a hands-on photo restoration that takes an image from a damaged start to a restored finish. In this video from chapter nine of the course, you’ll see a before and after of the course project restoration, and a run-down of the improvements Janine will help you tackle, including, the restoration of a major crack through the subject’s face, color alteration, and the removal of several major damage spots:
The course was recorded in CS5 but it’s real strength is the best-practices approach that Janine takes to photo restoration, so you should find valuable information here even if you’re still working in CS4, or if you’ve just forayed into the brave new world of Photoshop CS6.
Photoshop is a complicated program that can be used in infinite ways for a variety of creative endeavors. The team at lynda.com is dedicated to making sure you can find a course (or maybe three) that really provides the depth of coverage, level of context, and variety of specific interest that you need. Are you looking for a place to start with Photoshop? Let us know here, and we’ll share our ideas about where to begin.
In this week’s free Deke’s Techniques, you’ll see how to create text out of thin air—well—smokey thin air. Using a photograph of smoke and some editable text, Deke shows you how to make wispy, ethereal letters using a standard text layer and Smart Objects.
You’ll start by putting your white, soon-to-be smokey, text in front of a plain black background layer, and merging these two layers to make a Smart Object. Next, you’ll work on distorting the text with a smart version of the Wave filter and managing the Randomize setting (which means clicking it until you get something you like) to make your smoke seem properly transient.
Then it’s a matter of adding appropriate Motion Blur, applying the best blend mode (in this case Color Dodge), and finishing up with some more Gaussian blur. Because Color Dodge is one of those blend modes that responds to Fill Opacity better than standard layer opacity, you’ll also reduce the Fill Opacity. The result is this completely editable, ethereal effect:
If this effect seems familiar, it’s because you’ve probably seen it in action in the thumbnail graphic and introductory movie from Deke’s free Photoshop CS6 Beta Preview course (a living example of Deke using his effects in his own projects).
See you back next week with another free technique!
Designing for the web is a bit different than designing for print, so it’s important that you set up your Photoshop document correctly before you begin designing your web mockup.
First, in Photoshop, go to File > New. This opens up the New Document dialog box, where you can choose everything you need. Start with the Preset pull-down and choose Web. From there, you can choose the size of your document. If you want your site to appeal to the largest possible audience, don’t choose dimensions that are too wide or too narrow. A good starting place is 960 pixels wide and 690 pixels high. You can always adjust as you go, but this is a good starting size.
Leave the Color Mode set to RGB Color and 8 bit. Background Contents refers to the background color for your document. Leave it set to White. Click OK.
To help in your design layout, turn on your rulers by going to View > Rulers (or keyboard shortcut Ctrl+R in Windows, Cmd+R on a Mac). Since you’re in a web document, the rulers should display in pixels. Right-click on your ruler and select Pixels.
You can also select View > Show > Grid if you want a grid to help you with your design layout, and you can drag out some guides to assist you in the placement of your design. To create a guide, click and drag from a ruler into your document. Turn on the Info panel (Window > Info) to give you the precise location of your guide. You can reposition your guide at any time with the Move tool, and if you want to remove a guide, simply drag it off the art board.
Now that you’ve set the dimensions, color space, and resolution for your working file, you can easily move ahead with the creation of your web-design mockup.
This week’s Deke’s Techniques continues the celebration of Spring that began last week with an exercise in creating type out of freshly cut turf. In last week’s episode, Deke showed you how to create leafy letters by using a Photoshop type layer as a mask. In this week’s free video, you’ll see how Deke renders type in freshly cut grass. Like last week’s leafy letters, this technique begins by using a Photoshop text layer as a mask for a grassy green photograph, and leverages the power of Refine Mask to ensure that the letters have appropriately rendered edges that do justice to the grass hedges of our masked image.
This week Deke also goes a little further to show you the nuances of working with grass on dirt, which requires anticipating how to lift the appropriate shadow color from the dirt that underlies the turf. A grass effect is particularly sensitive to the Refine Edge command, meaning that the letters tend to run together in an unfortunate way. To avoid this, Deke shows you how to split the layer mask into two parts in order to make sure the letters retain their separation. As a final step, if you are working with turf, you naturally need to embed a perfectly landed golf ball into your image. With careful application of the shadow, you can really sell this effect, as seen here:
If you’re wondering why Photoshop looks so dark and elegant in this video tutorial, it’s because Deke has demonstrated the effect inside of the Photoshop CS6 public beta. For a limited time, you can download the application, free of charge, from Adobe Labs, and if you find yourself disoriented, you can also watch Deke’s entire Photoshop CS6 Beta Preview in the lynda.com library. The CS6 Beta Preview course has been unlocked and is free to everyone for a limited time during the beta cycle, so it’s a great time to try these techniques in the latest version of Photoshop.
See you back next week with another fresh technique from Deke!
In this week’s free Deke’s Techniques video, Deke turns ordinary text into…a shrubbery! This relatively simple technique combines a text layer and a leafy photo to make letters that appear to be made from foliage.
Deke begins by creating a mask using the standard Myriad Pro text. Then, using the Refine Mask command (in Photoshop CS5 or later—later meaning Photoshop CS6 beta), he renders his text to have a realistic, botanical effect. The refinement supplied by the Refine Mask feature allows the leaves to gracefully manifest around the letter edges, providing some transparency and detail. He follows up this relatively simple procedure with some key layer effects (Drop Shadow and Inner Glow) and voila, leafy letters! It’s a quick, easy technique that has an abundance of potential uses.
It’s good to keep in mind that you don’t have to use text for your mask—really, any shape outline will do.
If you’d like to go full topiary, Deke also has a member-exclusive tutorial this week called Creating topiary type, where he explains how to create the full grown from the ground look. All you need is a photo featuring some nicely textured plant life, and your Photoshop garden can grow to whatever shape you desire. Since Deke is lounging in Hawaii this week, I decided to use this technique to create the tropical topiary you see below. Applying the technique to a different set of files only required a few adjustments in the Refine Edge panel and a slightly different green for the Inner Glow layer style.
Deke will return from his island sojourn with another free technique next week.
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.
A recent article on sbomagazine.com, the web site for School Band & Orchestra magazine, featured lynda.com in an article on distance learning, and the role technology plays in education today. The article begins by stating that “technology is changing how we deliver education,” and continues to identify and discuss three models for technology-based distance learning. [...]
TechCrunch wrote a great story about lynda.com yesterday that explains our roots, passion for learning, and how our founders built a company focused on product, not profit.
Recently lynda.com co-founder Lynda Weinman spoke to Big Think about her business-building philosophy, and the value of sustainability over market share. Lynda’s interview joins Big Think archives that include interviews with Peter Rojas, co-founder of Engadget, and award-winning documentary filmmaker Ken Burns.
Khan Academy founder Salman Khan was recently in Santa Barbara to speak at the UCSB Arts & Lectures program, and before his public lecture, he spoke with lynda.com co-founder Lynda Weinman about his thoughts on teachers, Khan Academy’s impact on education, and his future plans. Read the full interview at the Santa Barbara Independent.
