It’s been a while since my last video course. Roughly 7 weeks to be exact. What have I been doing with myself? I blame Deke’s Techniques. And That Darn Challenge. And then, of course, my personal life. Which has been a blast lately.

Even so, last Thursday (September 13) marked the debut of my 55th video course for lynda.com, Photoshop CS6 One-on-One: Advanced. Which I believe to be quite good and also educational in nature. Watch the video above to decide for yourself.

Photoshop CS6 One-on-One: Advanced comprises a total of 12 chapters. About half of them are of special interest to photographers, and the other half are of special interest to designers. And, of course, all of them are of special interest to people who don’t mindlessly label themselves.

For photographers, I have chapters on duotones, Photoshop’s noise-wrangling tools, the exquisite Camera Raw 7, and CS6’s new Blur Gallery—the last of which lets you create depth-of-field effects in post, as demonstrated by the side-by-side comparison below.

You can go ape shit with the Blur Gallery. And, yes, I mean that literally. You can literally blur the shit of an ape.

Meanwhile, the other half are of special interest to designers. I start early with an insightful chapter on smart objects, followed by a command that relies on smart objects, Shadows/Highlights. I also cover the wide world of blend modes, the magic-wand-on-steroids Color Range command, and the underappreciated Refine Edge, the last of which lets you transform the first guy below into the second one, who is frankly loving life with the shiny clouds and the disco boogie. And, seriously, his sunglasses are blue. Red State or Blue State, you want blue skies and blue sunglasses, am I right?

If you’re not a member of lynda.com, (wait, what? you’re not a member of lynda.com? what?), you can still watch a couple of my free “mini-courses” on two of the most powerful features in Photoshop, the Curves command and the Pen tool. Here’s how it works: lynda.com always unlocks a percentage of every course it publishes. And this time around, I and the good people at lynda.com (fourth mention) have arranged that those free, unlocked movies be unlocked in concentrated doses. So that you can experience them as they were meant to be experienced, in concentrated doses.

To see what I mean, go to the landing page for my Photoshop CS6 One-on-One: Advanced course and check out the first four movies in Chapter 26, “Using Curves,” and the first six movies in Chapter 34, “The Pen Tool,” all of which are free to the most casual of passersby.

Meanwhile, as if that’s not enough, I have included two free movies in the very first chapter, Chapter 23, which the kids are calling “Shortcuts and Settings.” (I can’t explain it. It’s a kid thing.) This chapter includes information on my latest and dramatically revised dekeKeys, which you can download by right-clicking here. This sizzling hot zip file includes a couple of HTML documents that examine every shortcut—whether a Photoshop-native shortcut or one of my highly reasoned revisions—for both the Mac and the PC. Seriously, this amazing dekeKeys file, when double-clicked upon, is going to make you fully 1.1% more productive than you are now. And that is not an exaggeration.

Anyway, as usual, let me know what you think of the stuff. And the junk. And the shit of the apes. Wow, apparently I have completely run out of anything useful to say.