Excerpted from Photoshop CS6 Beta Preview on lynda.com. The most obvious change to Adobe Photoshop CS6 is its darkened interface. If you work in Lightroom, then you are already familiar with a dark gray workspace. If not, this Lynda.com video by Deke McClelland is a good introduction. Why did Adobe decide to do an about-face? […]

Excerpted from Deke’s Techniques on lynda.com. Starbursts are very popular in layouts and illustrations of all sorts, and that’s a problem. You don’t want to look like everything else! But that doesn’t mean you need to give up starbursts — customize them instead. In this tutorial video, I’ll show you two ways to make unique […]

You could call this Photoshop how-to “Deke… In… SPAAAAACE!” In this eight-minute video, I’ll show you how to go from a plain black rectangle to a cosmic scene complete with stars, planets, and space gas. All it takes is Photoshop’s Add Noise and Gaussian Blur filters, some Levels adjustment, strategically placed Lens Flare, and you’ll […]

Excerpted from Deke’s Techniques on lynda.com. This tutorial shows how to create the shattered-mirror reflection of a woman, whose scream may or may not have broken the glass. And while the model’s angst clearly possesses destructive properties, the modifications I demonstrate in this video decidedly do not. Through the intelligent use of Smart Filters, each […]

Have you ever noticed that when some objects get really hot, the edges are bright, the centers are burnt dark, and you can see heat rippling upward? That’s what I’m going to teach you how to do, in Photoshop, with type. You’ll use a smoldering combination of Smart Objects, four layer effects, the Ripple filter, […]

Have you ever devoted hours to figuring out just the right combination of Photoshop effects for a headline, only to realize too late that the headline contains a big, fat typo? Smart objects can spare you that pain because you can always edit the text without undoing your cool effects. The video tutorial below explains […]

About a dozen years ago, I engaged in the only cosmetic surgery of my life (so far!), LASIK. It corrected my far vision. But now that my aging crystalline lens is as impliable as a piece of beef jerky, I require reading glasses. And there’s not a thing Photoshop can do about it. Photoshop is […]

A couple of years ago, I petitioned a group of 50 or so photographers to seed me with raw images for some Camera Raw videos I recorded for lynda.com. The project went swimmingly, but I was troubled by the number of photographers (12? 15?) who told me they didn’t shoot raw, even though they owned […]

It’s difficult (verging on impossible) to exaggerate the importance of color adjustments in Photoshop. In the 19+ years I’ve been using the program, I don’t think I’ve come across a single image that I haven’t adjusted to some degree or other. And while there’s no single best command for adjusting colors (Hue/Saturation may work for […]

Someone new to Photoshop might be tempted to dismiss Gaussian Blur as something that makes stuff blurry. But the stalwart Gaussian Blur goes to the heart of what makes Photoshop Photoshop. The term Gaussian might be best described as the thing that makes another thing drift eventually and incrementally into oblivion. Gaussian Blur underlies the […]