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.