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The Newsletter of Things Deke: January 4, 2011

Hello, all!

New Year’s Eve always brings annual resolutions to mind. Have you resolved to strengthen your chops in Photoshop or Illustrator this year? With Deke’s help, you can chalk up success toward your new objectives in no time. The feature-rich Illustrator CS5 One-on-One: Mastery course is coming soon to lynda.com. In the meantime, if you’re interested in something more bite-sized, check out the new weekly Deke’s Techniques series, which starts today.

The tip for this issue is to forget anything negative you might have heard about Brightness/Contrast. It’s not that tool anymore. And, Martini Hour 96 features a postmortem on CS5: What works best and what still needs work.

This time of year may be known as the dark days of winter, but the lights are always on at deke.com. 

Deke’s Techniques #1, in Which Type Freezes Over

The new weekly Deke’s Techniques offers you the chance to learn inspiring graphics and imaging tricks, one self-contained topic at a time. The first installment, Creating Ice Type, shows you how to render live, editable type in something resembling ice, as pictured below. Watch, learn, and amaze your friends and colleagues.

Click on the graphic above to watch the video immediately at dekeOnline.

Deke Completes His Illustrator CS5 One-on-One: Mastery Course for lynda.com

Deke recently finished recording the 134 movies in his upcoming Illustrator CS5 One-on-One: Mastery, a deep foray into Adobe Illustrator, which rounds out the last of his wildly popular cradle-to-grave CS5 One-on-One courses. For a summary of the chapters, click the graphic below.

Look for it on lynda.com at the beginning of February.

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Tip: Brightness/Contrast Not Just “Not Bad,” It’s Actually Great

Once known for trashing images, Photoshop’s Brightness/Contrast command is now a simple and useful function. In fact, it’s not just “not bad,” it’s actually great. How poetic that Deke’s examples are butterflies, since most of those glistening insects start off as destructive caterpillars and eventually morph into beautiful things.

Those Photoshop veterans who may still tell you to avoid it used to be right. To see for yourself, turn on the Use Legacy check box and watch the tool revert to its old image-ravaging ways. Read »

Featured Image from Fotolia

The start of the new year always means out with the old (calendar) and in with the new. Today’s image, #27163727, is the Colorful Hexagons Calendar 211, © Germán Ariel Berra. Which might prove mighty helpful for planning your busy year. A detail appears below. Log in to Fotolia to view and download the image.

For the record, Fotolia offers the largest bank of royalty-free photos, illustrations, and videos perfect for any medium, whether print, motion, or web. Photographers and designers constantly update Fotolia with thousands of juried submissions each day. Fotolia protects its artists and offers high commissions while keeping prices low, so that everyone can enjoy and afford high-quality artwork.

Visit Fotolia »

Martini Hour 96, In Which Deke and Colleen Refuse to Jump the Shark

This week in the dekeLounge, Colleen and Deke take a look back at which features in Creative Suite 5 proved to be fun gadgets of limited practical use and which lived up to their game-changing promise. For instance, Content-Aware Fill doesn’t really solve any but the simplest healing needs, while Refine Edge brilliantly delivers on its promise to automate the masking process. Colleen invites listeners to share their own CS5 stories, and offers rewards for the best ones.

And incidentally, it’s heading toward Last Call in the lounge. Martini Hour will go out in style with Episode 11, so drink up while you can. But it’s not lights-out yet. You can rest assured that until the final episode wraps, Martini Hour will continue to offer the finest in audio-only lounge entertainment.

“Hi, I’m Deke, and I approve this Newsletter.”