How They Did It (Photoshop Masking Edition)

For this installment of How They Did It, Here are the 5 best free masking tutorials for Adobe PhotoShop on the web. There are many great sources for learning and mastering PhotoShop, I highly recommend watching and reading anything you can from Deke McClelland, Scott Kelby and the wonderful folks at Lynda.com.

Deke McClelland: The Essential Approach To Masking
If you watch any video on the essentials of masking images in PhotoShop, watch THIS one!

 
Photoshop CS5 Masking Tutorial
Masking, Mask Refinement and Non-Destructive image editing are vital components when compositing with Photoshop CS5. This is a pretty good tutorial. via http://shawnkent.net

Photoshop Tutorial: Masking Techniques, part 1
A good round up of masking technique using paths, also: Part 2.


How To Remove Background Around Lots Of Hair Photoshop
A decent beginning tutorial. A handy use of the burn tool to take out fringing after a mask is created.

How to Quickly Select Images – Cut Out Detailed Images in Photoshop CS5
I like the use of the refine edge command in this tutorial.

Video 5

How to Make Star Fields in PhotoShop

This is a great tutorial from the ever helpful Deke Mcclelland that I thought I’d pass along. His whole Deke’s Technique series is well worth a gander. This is a very useful tutorial, where you get to learn how to create a fake star field from scratch in PhotoShop.

Digital Ephemera for July 20, 2011

Another Wednes­day has rolled around, so here’s my weekly col­lec­tion of inter­est­ing dig­i­tal ephemera I’ve found pok­ing around the vast Inter­net waste­land. Think of me as your guide through the eclectic dig­i­tal desert…

Art and Design

A swinging interview with the great artist, SHAG!

A very interesting lecture from Robert Williams, founder of the important Low-Brow Art magazine Juxtapoz.

The master of all things digital media, Deke McClelland presents another one of his amazing Deke’s Techniques. This time, learn how to use blending and opacity to create shooting stars in Adobe Illustrator!

Film, Video and Motion Graphics

In difficult moments in life it is important to remember many, many have come before us and have turned their set backs into success.

This is a beautiful short film, Split Screen via Church Media Design:

Splitscreen: A Love Story from JW Griffiths on Vimeo.

This little promotion from video effects software creator Red Giant is hilarious! Plot Device…

Plot Device from Red Giant on Vimeo.

Marketing and Social Media

Interested in Google Analytics? Don’t know where to start? Check out this quick primer from Google.

Something Cool

I am a big fan of Dante, and I find this is pretty funny: A quick animation  of Dante’s Inferno done in MS Paint, yes you read that right. via poetryfoundation.org

Something Weird

Now this is eerie. A dial up modem slowed down 700 times. It’s pretty freaky, but in a good way.

Three Cool Sites Worth Checking Out

• You like Infographcs? Check out visual.ly, it’s amazing!
• You like Science Fiction, Horror or Fantasy? Check out the latest releases at podioracket.
• You like cool music? Check out the great Kurt Lorenz!

Adobe InDesign (really) Quick Tips

It’s amazing how long you can use a program, feel like you know it, then suddenly discover a simple little shortcut or technique that will save you a massive amount of time.  It’s a mixture of “ah-ha, that’s awesome!” and a little dash of “man, why didn’t I know that, I’m such an idiot.”

This just happened to me, I was listening to Episode 73 of the Martini Hour with Deke McClelland and Colleen Wheeler and they became embroiled in a discussion about how to get out of the text-editing mode inside PhotoShop via a keyboard shortcut. When you are typing or editing text and you want to access other tools you can’t make them active through the traditional keyboard short cuts, because if you hit the letter for the keyboard shortcut you’ll  only add that letter or if you try to hit return/enter on the main keyboard it will just create a new line like in a word processor. There is, however, a keyboard short cut for it in PhotoShop: either the enter key on the number pad or hit CTRL + Enter (PC) / CMD + Return (Mac). Colleen thought it was the ESC key at first, Deke said her confusion was because she was so used to using that shortcut in InDesign to do the same thing and she just expected it to work in the same way in PhotoShop.

That was a light bulb moment for me. I never knew that shortcut in InDesign! That is a huge time saver and I wanted to pass it along. When you are typing or editing text within a text box in InDesign and you want to switch to a different tool via a keyboard short cut,  all you have to do is hit the ESC key, then you are switched to the direct selection tool with the text box you were typing in selected. It’s pretty handy tip I learned when I least expected it. By the way if you hit ESC in PhotoShop you’ll lose all of your text edits, so don’t get confused.

Here’s the shortcuts sans my ah-ha moment:

Escape text editing within InDesign:

ESC

Escape text editing within PhotoShop:

CMD + Return (Mac)
CRTL + Enter (PC)
Enter on the Number keypad

The Essential Approach to Masking with Deke McClelland

Masking an image is one of the most difficult things to do convincingly in Photoshop. If you are interested in effective masking techniques, you need to watch this video! In it you will be guided by PhotoShop guru Deke McClelland and given the best principles for masking in PhotoShop. It’s almost like an entire lynda.com course in 29 min. Most surprisingly you’ll discover that the most powerful principle of  masking is not “dopey selection tools,” but:

…the art of having an image select itself.

If you don’t believe me, watch Master Deke and be amazed…

This video is an oldie but a goody, and came from Photoshop Guru Deke McClelland being guest blogger for fellow  Guru Scott Kelby on his great blog about all things Photoshop scottkelby.com.

A few secrets from the Deke Lounge, you ‘betcha!

Photoshop? You 'betcha!

When you visit the Deke Lounge to experience some liquid learning make sure you take off your shoes. The incomparable Deke McClelland and Colleen Wheeler do another bang up job in the Lounge this week. Joining them again are Russell Brown, the Bill Nye of Photoshop (okay it’s just the white lab coats that make me think this) and John Nack Adobe wizard and wordsmith.

This week the patrons of the Lounge discuss Layers and Filters in Photoshop. While imbibing at the Lounge,  John Nack let slip some interesting factoids about my beloved Photoshop. It must have been the strong filtered and layered Martini that freed his already verbose tongue.

First cat that escaped the bag was that in CS4 the maximum number of layers that you could have in an individual file is somewhere on the order of 8,000. Though one of the commenter’s on deke.com say this isn’t true, but it only matters on the amount of RAM you have. The commenter labeled his comment as AFAIK,  which I had no idea what that meant. After consulting with Dr. Google, I discovered it means ” As Far As I Know.” Considering that I can’t see why you would want even 1,000 layers let alone 8,000, I don’t think I’ll spending any time testing this. So I’ll just trust John Nack on this one .

The second secret of Photoshop John slipped was that although the maximum size of a PSD is 200,000px x 200,000px it wasn’t always this way. At one point they were testing letting a PSD have a max image size of 2 million pixels by 2 million pixels, you know in case you wanted to literally Photoshop the moon. However Adobe couldn’t find a powerful enough machine that wasn’t previously engaged trying to beat Gary Kasparov  to work on a file that large. So were stuck with only 200,000 measly pixels, who can do anything with that?

Finally and most awesome was the revelation that the super secret  Adobe code name for the Photoshop component code is,  Fargo. As in Fargo the movie… you ‘betcha! The component code is apparently the engine that runs the software and with the head of the code cut off adobe uses this code in its other suite of programs (Flash, Illustrator, etc…) so they can use PSD’s and keep the structure of the file.  Keeping the hierarchical structure of image files, in a way turns Photoshop into a sort of database program when you jump from program to program, which is very cool.

This is pretty interesting internal info, and it even was so cool it got Colleen to temporarily speak in the 3rd person! Listen to the Martini Hour and you’ll see. In addition to this version, all the previous versions of the code were also named after other Coen Brother’s films,  including Blood Simple, I sure hope Raising Arizona was in there.

Man, Photoshop, programming and Coen Brother’s? TRIPLE GEEK SCORE! Also the before mentioned commentator, who claims his name is one Jeff Tranberry said:

The component code names come from the Minnesota engineering team, specifically Tim Wright, who’s a huge Coen Bros. fan (The Coens are originally from MN).

I can’t believe I am actually quoting someone from the internet!  But it seems legit enough to me. On a creepy note when researching this I did find that Timothy Wright, the Adobe Systems Engineer  in question donated in the 2008 presidential election. See what sort of weird information you can find on the internet! Though the elections commission said precious little about the film habits of Mr. Wright.

Go check out the Deke Lounge…. and don’t forget to take off your shoes!

Martini Hour with Deke

I am a big fan of Deke McClelland. A Deke Geek so to speak. He just started a new audio podcast to compliment his already excellent video podcast, dekepod. You should check out the show he is co-hosting with Colleen Wheeler called The Martini Hour.

It mixes some of my favorite things. Kitschy Lounge settings, fancy cocktails and most importantly PhotoShop talk! Really can you ask for anything better. If you are interested in learning about PhotoShop and graphics talk with a little liquid insipiration, and I am not speaking of the filter, check out this fun little podcast. Both podcasts are available on iTunes and Deke’s site. Click here for more information.