Deke McClelland

It's Like a Little Ansel Adams Inside Photoshop

There are several ways to convert a color image to black and white in Photoshop. But CS3 has a lock on the best ways. Learn how to do it yourself.

Photoshop Tips: The Ins and Outs of Color

Most photographs look better after a little color balancing. Just go to Image > Adjustments > Color Balance, right? Nope. Photoshop's most obvious solutions are rarely its best. Use other methods for standout results.

InDesign Tips: Do You Have Style?

If you could change one work habit and avert not just days, but even weeks, of boring manual labor, would you make the change? Learn how InDesign uses style sheets to automatically format paragraphs, characters, and objects.

Illustrator How-To: Number Crunching

When it comes to numbers, proper fractions, ordinals, and old-style figures separate the pros from the amateurs. Let Deke McClelland show you the easy way to set professional-looking numbers.

Illustrator How-To: Masks, Meatballs, and Robots

This how-to is not an April Fools joke, even though it does contain such an unlikely trio. Deke McClelland combines practical advice and his oddball sense of humor to make masking items in Illustrator CS mere child's play.

InDesign How-To: Editing Drop Shadows

InDesign apart from QuarkXPress. You can apply drop shadows to text or graphics with equal ease and then edit them to suit your taste. In this video tutorial, Deke McClelland shows how to work with drop shadows in InDesign.

Illustrator How-To: Using Stroke Offsets for Depth Effects

Adding strokes to type lends definition to text, but adding offset strokes adds dimension to text. In this video tutorial, Deke McClelland shows how to use the Transform Effect feature in Illustrator CS to add depth to text.

Photoshop How-To: Using the Lens Blur Filter

New to Photoshop CS is the Lens Blur filter, an interactive menu that lets you add interesting visual effects to images. In this video tutorial, Deke McClelland gives a hands-on demonstration of how it works.

Michael Elins' Photo Painting Technique

To give me a sense of his underpainting technique, Elins walked me through a sample image. It involved the transformation of a photograph that Elins shot...

Photo Illustration: Michael Elins on Painting Images

It takes a village to raise a project. Artists, photographers, retouchers, designers, programmers, editors, musicians, engineers, animators, assistants, managers, directors, publishers, producers, and, yes, even clients have to be able to look at a job, communicate their ideas, and add their spices to the stew.