In this week’s free Deke’s Techniques episode, Deke takes his culture of created cells and basically kills half of them. Why, you ask? Well, it’s a dramatic way to demonstrate how you can manipulate a vector-based smart object (courtesy of Illustrator) from within a Photoshop project.

OK, actually he starts with some dark, dead cells that were part of last week’s project, then brightens a couple of its layers in Illustrator (via a smart object edit) and then masks half of them. So I guess you could buy Deke’s explanation and call it bringing the dead cells to life.

If you’d like to see the inner workings of this project (and by extension the last few episodes of Deke’s Techniques, you can download Deke’s exercise file at the bottom of the post.

If you like using Photoshop and Illustrator to create new life forms (and star fields, and snowflakes, and…), try clicking the Something from Nothing tag at the top and getting a visual array of all the techniques that don’t start with existing assets.

Deke’s Techniques, testing whether your petri dish is half-full or half-empty!