Design > Features

Ah, the holiday season, a time of expansion. Great physical expansion. Fatty, high-calories food is everywhere you turn. And so we grow. But not this year. In some distant future, when you review Thanksgiving 2008 in your photo album, you’ll look back on it as the first of many years that you actually lost weight. "Thank you dekePod," you'll say. Because in this episode, Deke teaches you how to transform fat into fit using the Liquify command—and with smooth, stretch mark-free results.

tags: how-to, photo editing, photoshop, podcast

Photography > Spotlight: Inside Aperture > Features

While at PhotoPlus Expo in NY, Derrick Story sat down with Rob Trueman and Cathy Chung to talk about their experiences with the Fall 2008 Aperture Nature Photography Workshop in the Grand Teton National Park. Rob and Cathy were two of the four contest winners who earned a trip to the Grand Tetons where they received one-on-one instruction. During this discussion they talk about what they learned and how they are applying that knowledge now.

tags: aperture, apple, photographers, workflow

Creativity > Features

In this article, we take a look at how the Heroes VFX team fried Hayden Panettierre to a crisp, shattered a human Popsicle®, and tore Tokyo in two using one of the industry’s best proprietary content management systems.

tags: filmmaking, special effects, tv

Audio > Features

NI has fused six of its high-end synths and effects into a single "greatest hits" instrument and piled on an elegant hardware control surface. Kore 2 delivers the full sound of the component instruments in a streamlined package at a friendly price. Jochen Wolters dives deep and comes away impressed.

tags: digital music, music, music technology

Photography > Features

Not only is Adobe Camera Raw terrific for processing individual files, you can batch process with it too. In this screencast, based on Chapter 4 of The Photoshop CS4 Companion for Photographers, Derrick shows you how ACR makes easy work of multiple images.

tags: photo editing, photo production, photoshop, podcast

Creativity > Features

In less than five years, Guitar Hero has become not only one of the most successful video games of all time but also a pop cultural phenomenon, immortalized on everything from South Park to Gossip Girl (Serena shreds "Free Bird"). Read all about how the game makers create convincing avatars of your favorite rockers, and scrapped a remarkably inaccurate scripting program for musical notation they dubbed "Murder Face."

tags: games, music, music technology