Design > Features

Have you ever wanted to create an authentic looking Andy Warhol silkscreen? One of the most influential artists of the 20th century, Warhol was known for his avant-garde paintings and screenprintings. Remember Warhol’s garishly colored celebrity images of Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, or Mao Zedong? In the studio he called The Factory, Warhol took an assembly-line approach to his high-contrast, silkscreens and produced art as a mass consumable, like a t-shirt or a pack of gum. It’s not surprising that his art is still popular today, and there are lots of one-click Warhol solutions. But if you want the real thing, join Deke McClelland in the final episode of this dekePod series, as he dissects Warhol’s process, and shows you how to use Photoshop to render your favorite portrait in bona-fide Warhol magnificence.

Design > Features

Signs are our friends. They help us observe the rules when we actually need to know the rules. We don’t all speak English, and tourism is a huge industry, so signs need to be language-independent. Which is why a vocabulary of immediately identifiable symbols is essential to every working artist and designer. So if symbols are so important, why are most such an indecipherable mess? Computer icons! Laundry instructions! Or Deke’s favorite: What you shouldn’t throw into an airplane toilet! Learn what works and what doesn’t in this laugh-out-loud episode of dekePod.

tags: photoshop

Design > Features

They say you can’t be too rich or too thin. So how about getting rich by making others thin? Plenty of experienced retouchers make small but enviable fortunes shaving body fat off already lithe models. But rather than showing you a present-day example--honestly, how many underfed waifs do we need to see made skinnier?--Deke takes us back to a time when ideas of beauty were very different: the High Renaissance. In those times of mean circumstances and manual labor, body fat was a thing to be envied. How best to take a well-fed model rendered by the likes of Raphael and make her look like a modern work of art?

tags: adobe, creativity, photoshop, podcast

Design > Features

The ocean is a different world. Where else can you cavort with colorful animals a thousand feet or more above the Earth’s surface? But the romance of the sea comes at a price. Just as the watery depths rob our lungs of air, they rob our eyes of color. It’s not uncommon for an underwater photo to lack any information in the Red channel. Which is where coral, clown fish, and our very own skin tones live. Fortunately, Deke knows how to summon a Red channel back from the dead. Watch this dekePod and learn how to create underwater images that will satisfy your inner Jacques Cousteau.

tags: photo editing, photo production, photoshop, podcast

Creativity > Features

If you use Photoshop, then you probably browse your images with Adobe’s Bridge, which shows you thumbnails of your files. Good news: The Bridge lets you preview images without going to the trouble of opening them. Bad news: Those previews result in large cache files that eat up your hard drive. Worse yet, they permit others to track what you’ve been looking at. Even if you’ve long since destroyed the original file, the thumbnail persists! Learn how to protect yourself—and maybe even save your job.

tags: adobe, photo organizing, photoshop, podcast

Design > Features

Adobe's landmark pen tool defined an industry. But to the uninitiated, its reliance on anchor points and control handles makes it as approachable as first-year algebra. Until you see it's nothing more than a mating ritual: The points are boys and the handles are girls. Once you get that, it all falls into place.

tags: illustrator, image editing, photoshop, podcast