Fem korta frågor till Deke McClelland

Jag har intervjuat några riktigt produktiva människor förut men Deke McClelland är nog störst.

Han har bland annat skrivit the Photoshop Bible och, den enligt mig lysande, Photoshop CS2 One-On-One. Har man stålar (2500:-) så är hans 20 timmars videokurs från Total Training det bästa som finns på DVD.

Så han är förstås en liten idol till mig och det var kul att få ställa de fem frågorna till honom.

1. Hello Deke! For how long have you been using Photoshop?

I’ve been using Photoshop since it came out in 1990, back when it ran only on the Macintosh. I first wrote about it in the April, 1991 issue of Macworld magazine in an article called ”The Electronic Palette,” back when Photoshop 1.0.7 competed with such extinct programs as ColorStudio, Studio/32, and Color MacCheese. In September of that same year, I reviewed Photoshop 2.0. My last two sentences: ”If you make your living in graphic art, Photoshop is worth the price of the Mac itself. It’s that good.”

2. What made you feel that ”this is the thing”, I’m going to learn everything I can about this?

Almost immediately. I started trying to sell a book on Photoshop in 1991. By then I had 20 books under my belt, but it was an uphill battle. Publishers saw the image-editing market as too risky. After two false starts, I hooked up with IDG Books and contracted to create the Macworld Photoshop 2.5 Bible. I wrote the 700-page book in three and a half months. I was just 30 at the time, but it almost killed me. Fortunately it paid off. When the book debuted at the Macworld Expo in Boston, it sold more than 500 copies in three days – about one book every two minutes – which I’m told remains a record.

3. Favourite tool that can never ever be removed from Photoshop?

These days, I’m really grooving on Camera Raw, smart objects, and scripting. There’s just so much you can do with them. But if I had to pick one function – just one function in all of Photoshop – I’d pick the hand tool. Can you imagine not being able to scroll an image with the spacebar? You’d have to rely on the scroll bars, or the Navigator palette for Christ’s sake! The hand tool first appeared in the original MacPaint in 1984. It was a hidden feature that you could get only by pressing the Option key. Wow, what a tool!

4. Future tool/feature that you would love to have in Photoshop?

I’d like to see a feature that would deposit $1,000,000 U.S. into an offshore account every morning at 4:00 am. Of course, it would only work for me. That would be a really cool.

Oh, you mean something real. The feature that I’ve been requesting for years is filter layers. Imagine if you could apply Smart Sharpen or Gaussian Blur as an adjustment layer. One that would work with *any* image and affect all layers below it. That would rock. So far, it hasn’t happened. But I’m optimistic. One day it will happen.

5. What to you do with your own vacation photos? Do you edit them?

In the years right after my boys were born, I was shooting pictures of them constantly and hand-editing every one that I thought was the least bit good. But you know how it is. You get distracted and start playing with other toys. Recently, I’ve been shooting videos and downsampling them for my iPod. But I’ll probably get back to images soon. This summer we’ll be taking a trip to Switzerland. I imagine I’ll shoot a lot of still photos and spend a lot of time editing them.

Deke McClelland webbplats

Dekes podcast (kopplar upp dig med iTunes)

DVD:er på Total Training

Fler fem korta frågor