Photoshop CS4, political jokes, elements vids
... and more!
It's a jungle out there...
Faking an HDR Portrait with Deke
Deke McClelland teaches and entertains... in this episode, Deke investigates how to simulate an extreme-detail HDR portrait -- which would otherwise require you to shoot multiple exposures of a person locked down in a body brace -- using flimflam and forgery. And a shrunken skull. These are the depths of scariness Deke goes to.
Adobe Creative Suite 4: what will it cost?
Okay, here you go! It's that time again, and it's going to cost $$$. Since most of our readers already one or another version of Adobe® Creative Suite® here's what it will cost you to upgrade to CS4. We're also showing Photoshop Elements 6 for Mac, and Adobe Elements 7 for Windows because they may be viable alternatives. You may as well go ahead and buy now. You know you won't have any money after the holidays! ($499 times 3-million is how much? I'm not a math person!) Read them and weep
Adobe Photoshop CS4: New Features
Time to learn new stuff... like the ll new: Masks panel; Content-Aware Scaling; Adjustments panel; Auto-blending of images; Smoother panning and zooming and fluid canvas rotation; Auto-alignment of layers; Extended depth of field; Lightroom workflow; Better raw image processing; and a lot more! Just a few of the new Adobe Photoshop CS4 features
Sneak Peek at Adobe Photoshop CS4
Well, you knew it was only a matter of 18 months. And by our calculations, Adobe should do the financial system buy-out, rather than the U.S. Government. Do the math: how many millions of Adobe products users - times - $199 to upgrade - every 18 months? That's more than the gross national product of many countries! But hey, we're not complaining. Follow along as Deke rolls out his latest DekePOD adventure on the new Adobe Photoshop CS4.
Only a matter of time ... 
There are scores and scores of Photoshop photo modifications of the political candidates these days, but one that stirred quite a bit of controversy is this crafty mod found at Doctor Casino's Flicker account. But c'mon! Is that all you've got? Switching a head is 1st grade stuff. Show us something we don't already know!
While it looks as if it was posted to defame Sarah Palin, we suspect it was only posted to generate Google rankings for illegal gambling sites -- a frequent method of getting links to shady places. We also believe it's okay to make political cartoons and parodies using Photoshop, we urge Photoshop users to exercise a bit of restraint and keep your intentions honorable. Interesting comments can be found at
huffingtonpost.com

others include...
World Haircuts shows you how to get the "Palin" style by Photoshopping Palin's hair-doo on Angelina Jolie... PerezHilton.com ("Hollywood's Most-Hated Web Site") Photoshop's pigs snouts on Palin and McCain .... 4hillary.wordpress.com does an almost believable Photoshop job of putting Sarah's face on a Vogue magazine... and last but not least you can see a whole collection of Photoshop-Sarah jobs at jeffcowebboard.com including this stunning retouch job that seems to have missed the tutorials on lasso tools and feathering. (Actually, we're not even sure if they got the picture right. Oh well!)

Photoshop Color Photo Transitions
Whew! And now for something more serious:
In this video, Matt Kloskowski uses a combination of layer styles and gradients to add color transitions in your photos. You can use color transitions as backgrounds for your photos or just to simplify a photo with lots of empty area in it that you can't crop out.
Color Photo Transitions: Video Tutorial

Perfect digital skin
Well, we don't know if this is really the perfect digital skin, but this tutorial has some valuable tips and techniques, and the page is relatively spam-free. These techniques are used to texture and post-produce a pretty nice 3D cover image in this 3D World tutorial. The author says:
Realistic skin is hard to fake because it's both an artistic and a technical challenge. It's artistic because you can almost feel a character's personality through the look of its skin; its wrinkles, colours and beauty spots. But it's also a technical test, because skin isn't like a homogeneous material that has simple physical properties – it's composed of several different layers.
Perfect Skin introduction, and PDF
Bert Monroy: Shadows for new images in existing scenes
Bert Monroy gets his name mentioned at least once a day in the forums -- and for good reason.
Several people have inquired about shadows and understanding channels, so we've grabbed this outstanding tutorial by Bert. He reflects on the techniques he used to create a painting of a shoe shop in Photoshop, including tips on how to create realistic reflections and shadows
This is a chapter in his awesome book Photoshop Studio with Bert Monroy: Digital Painting

Photoshop Emergency But not all is all roses -- yes, this does look like an emergency! In the retouching area, this guy is trying to put one person's head on another's body and runs into some problems in color correction and balance ...
Photo Frames:
There are all sorts of new additions in the Photoshop Gallery. We just ran across a whole series of downloadable Photo Frames posted by junior member Pilotikus. Some of these are pretty cool -- and they're at 300 ppi so they should print well too!
You just never know what you're missing if you don't visit and join the Photoshop 911 forums.
What Photoshop Madness have you encountered?
Of course we invite your close encounters with Photoshop Madness... just tell us a little bit about the encounter and we'll take it from there. DTG readers love to hear your experiences! Also, don't forget to drop in on the Photoshop 911 Forums to help out all those readers who have Photoshop Emergencies!
Ask questions and discuss this in the Forums
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Editor / Publisher, DT&G Magazine
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