In this week’s free Deke’s Techniques episode, Deke makes the Lens Flare safe for use by earthlings. Namely, earthlings working in the service of improving the windows of our alien overlords. Subtle use of the hard-to-employ-subtly feature combined with a little rainbow gradient adds some spectral dimension to the window of last week’s alien rocket ship, thus ensuring that the aliens who come to eat our faces look suitably cool when they arrive. 

The episode begins with an impassioned, delightful, and yet mildly insane rant on the use of lens flare by Deke, which I find entertaining but slightly inconsistent given Deke’s the man who brought you this in Deke’s Techniques episode 015: Creating a Synthetic Starfield:

So what’s the deal? Lens flare is OK if you’re George Lucas but not if you’re JJ Abrams? Or has Deke recently been taken over by aliens who want him to ix-nay on the ens-flare-lay in an attempt to keep us off guard whilst they plan earth’s demise? Find out nothing of the sort (but learn a cool technique) in this week’s episode. 

And if you’d like to test earlier-Deke versus current-possibly-alien-abducted-Deke by perusing an assortment of Deke’s Techniques past and present, you can find them all here. And if you’re not a member of lynda.com (what are you, an alien?) and you’d like to check it out, you can get a free week’s trial at lynda.com/deke.