Robot nuts & bolts
Have an image that needs an absolute color overhaul? This video shows you how to apply some shockingly massive edits, get great results, and clean up the histogram so it looks like you never set foot in Photoshop.

Ah, Yes, I Rather Made a Promise

This week's dekePod, Stealth 'Shop, The Virgin Histogram, features a photograph of one of San Francisco's most infamous (and I think wonderful) pieces of private artwork, a great towering anatomically enhanced robot by Nemo Gould.

In the Conclusion to my video, I say, "Or go to my personal site, deke.com, which also contains the uncensored robot photo. And yes, that whole phallus thing, I was not making it up. It's quite evident." That's my way of saying, be forewarned before proceeding. Read more » 

InDesign Forensics: What Your Editor Knows about You

One of the dirty little secrets here in dekeVille is that the some of the files for the One-on-One series have been around for a long long time. Oh, not that Deke hasn't rewritten things a neurotic number of times (he has. . . he has because he cares, and. . . because he's mildly insane) or that we haven't converted the files to whatever the current version of InDesign (we have, we have because we need to practice with the new stuff anyway). But many of these files were like houses taken down to the foundation during rennovation gone amok, but then rebuilt on that same foundation (only to realize the foundation needed to be fortified).

We realize our files are old when InDesign starts going haywire, and in our case, text wrap has been one of those telltale areas where the cracks start to show. In fact, last year, Deke and I were complaining to Michael Ninness (InDesign PM at Adobe) about how they'd taken out the ability to see custom text wrap frames, and he's all, "We did not. What are you mildly insane people talking about?"

So, we sent off the file, and the upshot was, it was, like, a CS3 document that started out life as an InDesign 2.0 file. Myke and his team didn't really have a solution for our problem (well, cut-and-repaste helped) other than to say congratulations on submitting the creakiest legacy files ever observed in the wild, but he did show me this cool trick for seeing your document's history. Simple, just open the file, hold down the Command (Ctrl) key, and choose InDesign > About InDesign (or the Windows equivalent, you know the drill) and you get this scarily revealing window (shown here with the info for one of my current projects).

Read more » 

. Tagged with:

Welcome to dekeOnline

Hi, this is note from me, Deke. Forgive the potentially rough appearance of this newsletter (which is going out as an email to all registered users). But we didn't want to get all slick with our messaging.

I know you have lots of busy stuff going on today. (And from here, it looks like you're doing a great job juggling the, you know, the things that you juggle with the stuff in the air and the things. So kudos for that.) But I wanted to take just a moment of your time to thank you for joining dekeOnline. I am sincerely glad that you've opted into our madcap imaging + graphics + design tea party.

So, yoiks, quite to my surprise, the site has gone through the roof. Over the Bastille Day weekend (July 13th and 14th), Alexa.com claims we entered the ethereal realm of the Top 50,000 sites. (Where's Kasey Kaisim to read it?) Google Analytics shows us trouncing the typical site our size (me blue, them gray, below). And when I say "trounce," I mean it in a kind, Care Bear, loving way.

Read more » 

Such a Bad Week for "Evil"

So there I was, reviewing recent events.

And I couldn't help but recall that, in this week's up-and-coming episode of dekePod, I was forbidden from mentioning the word "penis." (True story, more on Wednesday.) This despite the fact that many famous people, not to mention many famous works of art (below), include them.

Penises of yore Read more » 

Illustrator Transparency + Photoshop Resolve, Part 2

dekeStuff, dynamic, effects, flattener, Illustrator, Photoshop, preview, rasterize, render, Sammy, transparency

I believe it was three weeks ago that I began to tell you good folks about how to transform this:

into the glam phantom-of-an-illustration witnessed below using Illustrator's Transparency functions. The danger is that virtually every effect I'm applying falls outside the boundaries of the professional print standard PostScript, meaning that there's a high chance that this artwork might exhibit errors when you receive 10,000 copies back from your commercial print house. Which is a real heartbreaker, as anyone who's encountered such blunders knows. Doubly so, because each and every heartbreak can be anticipated and eliminated with the help of Photoshop.

By the end of Part 1, I had transformed my son Sammy (shown here during his early days of smooth and impeccable baldness) into the near masterwork seen below. In this final part, I will add several details with the help of Illustrator's blend modes. Then I'll mask the entire illustration and ship it off to Photoshop for final rasterization. As much as it may pain you -- at least philosophically -- to convert your razor-sharp vectors into resolution-dependent pixels, this Photoshop provides a practical, no surprises = no tears solution.

Read more » 

. Tagged with: