Hark! It’s the first ever episode of the v2b3 — our brand-new podcast featuring 3 questions in 3 minutes or less, with v2b authors, folks on the team, and excellent cohorts from around the industry. Using only 3 words! Spoken in 3 languages! At the same time!
OK, er, maybe not those last few….
First up is a recent chat with Kelly McCathran, coauthor of both Adobe Flash Pro CS5: Learn by Video and Adobe Photoshop CS5: Learn by Video, both published in partnership with our friends at Adobe Press. Our thanks to Kelly for being the first to jump in, and please look for more episodes of the v2b3, coming soon to a video2brain blog near you…
You can find our new Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3: Learn by Video wherever world-class video training is sold, or you can check out this week’s Friday Freebies giveaway from our friends at @peachpit…..
I’ve had the good fortune to work with authors Mikkel Aaland and Tim Grey on a number of titles over the years, and I was really delighted that they could both fly out to Graz and team up to author Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3: Learn by Video, a new 10-hour course published in partnership with Peachpit Press and Adobe Press.
I’m equally delighted to announce that this great new title is now available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and a host of other fine retailers.
Mikkel and Tim got together not too long ago in the North Beach studio of photographer Dennis Hearne to discuss various things Lightroom and Photoshop. Several of these conversations will be part of a another course they’re co-authoring that’s coming out soon. One of these segments, we thought we’d share here — it’s a chat they had about Adobe Lightroom 3 and a few of their favorite new features. Enjoy!
Here’s the next in our series of AdobeTV tutorials. In this movie, John Dickinson demonstrates an amazing time-saving workflow in which you can use Adobe Dynamic Link to move between Adobe After Effects, Adobe Premiere Pro, and Adobe Encore without any unnecessary intermediate rendering.
For the last several months, we’ve been working with Peachpit Press and Adobe Press on expanding our line-up of Learn by Video titles. Each Learn by Video features over 10 hours of video training, a feature-rich interface, a test engine to help you reinforce what you learn, and a 120-page full-color book. And they’re authored by a really wonderful crew of talented instructors.
I asked Candyce recently about her favorite new features in Dreamweaver CS5. “Enable/Disable CSS Properties, and the all-important Inspect button,” she said. “Every website that I create has CSS on every page, so I use these features on every page I work on — these features alone are reason enough to upgrade!”
Candyce created over 12 hours of video training for Dreamweaver CS5: Learn by Video. This course aims to help master Adobe’s powerful web design software and while teaching you how to create well-designed rich media websites. In addition to her in-depth Dreamweaver coverage, Candyce also teaches you storyboarding, creating wireframes and site maps, and how to execute usability tests.
In this recent AdobeTV tutorial, Chad Chelius, coauthor of our upcoming Illustrator CS5: Learn by Video, give an introduction to CS Live, including an overview of the CS Live services and an in-depth look at how to set up CS Live within Adobe InDesign CS5.
Adobe Flash Professional CS5 and Adobe Flash Builder 4 feature new workflows aimed at helping you quickly and easily moving between the two applications. In this tutorial from our AdobeTV CS5 movies, Kevin Ruse, coauthor of Adobe Flash CS5 Professional: Learn by Video, shows you how you can begin your work in Adobe Flash Professional CS5, create and edit both ActionScript classes and interface files using Flash Builder 4, and then return to Adobe Flash Professional CS5 to test and debug yours SWFs.
We recently created a collection of tutorials for AdobeTV covering a variety of new CS5 features and over the next couple of weeks we’ll be posting many of them here on the site. In today’s video, John Dickinson of Motionworks gives a great tour of the Adobe Media Encoder CS5 interface, showing how you can add files to the encoding queue, customize your setting, and integrate Adobe Media Encoder CS5 into your Adobe After Effects and Adobe Premiere Pro workflows. This tutorial also highlights powerful new features like the Match Sequence Settings option, as well as Adobe Media Encoder CS5’s enhanced metadata management. Enjoy!
Photoshop CS5 recently received an exciting update called the Knowledge Panel. The Knowledge Panel lives inside Photoshop and offers tutorials for 70 key Photoshop tasks, including several that take advantage of new Photoshop CS5 features.
This feature is the brainchild of Adobe’s John Nack. On his blog, John recently described the thinking that led to this new feature:
I’ve long been frustrated that Adobe applications–like most large, powerful apps–simply throw the user into the deep end of the functionality pool. Very little in the interface suggests how pieces can or should be used in sequence to achieve a goal. The apps are highly flexible & very general, but users tend to suffer from ‘the paradox of choice.’ They know the app is capable of X, but they don’t know how to do it, and they may feel foolish & resentful.
The Knowledge Panel aims, in John’s words, to offer “best-practice guidance on how to accomplish specific tasks (‘not just yet another way to do something, but the *right* way’).” And it offers this guidance in context, within the tool itself.
The Knowledge Panel’s content was created by the Adobe Learning Resources team, in collaboration with our friends at Peachpit Press. We were delighted to have a chance to contribute this effort as well, supplying several tutorials written by our own Barbara Luef, and then supporting those tutorials with a number of videos from a host of excellent video2brain authors. You can also find these videos on this very blog under the Knowledge Panel tag.
Enjoy the videos! We hope the Knowledge Panel and these tutorials help you build your Photoshop skills and get even more out of this amazing application.
The Knowledge Panel offers a great way to learn about Adobe Photoshop CS5 from inside the application. video2brain was delighted to recently have the chance to provide several Knowledge Panel articles for Adobe Photoshop CS5.
In “Painting a Cloud,” we shared a recipe for painting a cloud from scratch using the new Mixer Brush tool and the Bristle Brush tip options.
The video tutorial is a companion to that article. In it, author and trainer Kelly McCathran demonstrates a related set of techniques — how you can use Photoshop’s Brush tools to add lovely effects to an existing image of a sunset sky over a cityscape, such as the different results you can get from a range of Wet settings. Whether you’re starting with a blank canvas or with a photo as raw material, Photoshop’s Brush tools give you an enormous range of options for creative expression.
