Last week, I showed you how to combine three real-world animals into an entirely fictional creature. This week, I show you how to take last week’s image and turn it into a plausible likeness of the one extraordinary shot that you were able to pull off before everything went all Blair Witch on you. I mean, who wouldn’t extend at least a small amount of credence to the final result (below)? But you’ll have to come up with one hell of a yarn about how you managed to live to tell the tale. Because, according to legend, El Terrible (as the bilingual natives call him) is so tactical and massive that he intentionally blots out the moonlight for a solid panic-inducing second before he casually crushes your rib cage and releases his appetite on your face.

Here’s the official description from lynda.com:

This week, that ever-wily Deke thinks of an ingenious way to cover your Photoshop tracks. If you recall, last week’s techniques (both the free movie and the members-only video inside the lynda.com Online Training Library) were about combining photos of three real-world creatures to create an other-worldly one. But as we all know, no missing-link photo is going to ever be credible if it’s not noisy, blurry, and oddly exposed. Turns out, the key is to actually shoot an unstable picture of your Photoshop screen with your camera and then add a few more helpings of weird exposure (inside Camera Raw), grain (the Add Noise filter in Photoshop), and more blur (of the Gaussian variety).

Editor’s note: Deke’s creature was so elusive that I had to experiment by applying the technique on another mysterious creature captured in its natural environment. For my particular version, I used my iPhone set to the HDR mode and “twirled” the phone to make the motion. Still scary I think.

Every week there’s a new free technique from Deke. Next week, he’ll move from this uncommon creature to a very ordinary Photoshop task: Changing the color of a car. And as trivial as that may sound, even this everyday task requires a solid technique. Find out what it is from Deke’s Techniques next week.

Next week’s car thing is a two-parter: I show how to change a car from red to gold (not just using the hue-sliding powers of Hue/Saturation, btw) in the free video. And then we make the car cool-as-shit black in the lynda.com-exclusive. For Pete’s sake, join the library. Your life will be so much easier.