Archive for the ‘Adobe’ Category

As you may have heard, Adobe has announced that it is moving all of its primary creative applications to its expansive online service, the Creative Cloud. There are many details and changes outlined in the letter from their team on the Adobe site.

Whether you are excited or cautious about what these changes will bring, we at InfiniteSkills have been preparing for this change, and we want to make it clear that our training will be as up to date and up to standard as you’ve come to expect. Here are a few things you can look forward to as our new Adobe training courses roll out:

New tutorials for new Adobe products. We have been working with Adobe and its latest prerelease versions to have new courses ready for you. Tutorials for Photoshop CC, Premiere Pro CC, InDesign CC, and Illustrator CC are in the pipeline, with more to come. We’re bringing back fan-favorite instructors Andy Anderson and Jeff Sengstack, too!

Incremental, focused courses. With its cloud model, Adobe won’t be releasing sweeping changes with every new version of its software. All indications suggest updates and upgrades will happen more gradually, so where it makes sense, our training will follow suit. We will be covering all of the primary Creative Cloud applications as they are presented at launch. But as feature sets begin to shift, you can expect to see offerings from us that focus on new features you need to know.

Integration with Adobe. As part of the announcement, Adobe has said they will be offering better access to high-quality instruction as part of the Creative Cloud package. As a respected member of the training community, we have been working with them step by step, and you will actually see some InfiniteSkills videos within your Cloud application. We will still have the most complete coverage in our DVDs, downloads, and iOS app. But expect to see some familiar faces.

You can count on InfiniteSkills to provide current and complete training on a wide range of topics, whether developed by Adobe, Autodesk, or anyone else out there, as long as people are using it. And if there’s a topic or program we aren’t covering that you would like to see, just let us know. We’re always listening to our fans, and that’s where some of our best ideas come from.

Interview with the author

AndyAnderson has been a photography professional for more than thirty years.  His work across various media has been widely published.  In the last decade, he has dedicated more of his time to instruction, helping other photographers to unlock the potentials of digital photography.  He recently sat down to discuss his latest course, Learning Adobe Lightroom 4 and outlining how this new release from Adobe offers digital photographers so much control.

A. I’m always happy to talk about teaching and to work with InfiniteSkills!

A. Teaching a course like Adobe Lightroom has a particular set of challenges and advantages.  The most important thing is that Lightroom is a program designed for photographers who come from a background in film.  The program integrates elements of the traditional dark room into the photographers experience in working in a digital environment.
So, the biggest challenge for me is in working between worlds and really showing students how Lightroom is designed to communicate with their experience in film. In order to teach people that are using this program, an instructor has to be able to think like a film photographer, so I make use of my skill sets from both the digital and film photography worlds to ensure that I teach the most useful pieces of Adobe Lightroom, and also that the course is taught really in the language of the photographer.

A. Well, I am a professional photographer, university professor, and have been shooting photographs since I was about 10 years old. I have lived through the transition from traditional film to digital, and I know first-hand the intricacies of both mediums as well as the difficulties in making that change.
It’s difficult for the student on their own to understand how to best transition from the traditional world of the darkroom, to the world of the computer; or from working with chemicals and light-sensitive papers and film, to pushing buttons and working with bits and bytes.
So I think it’s really my ability to draw from such a rich history in both mediums that comes through for students and allows me to be an effective guide. I can help them fit the pieces together and really optimize Lightroom’s capabilities.

A. Well as far as specifics in the course, a lot of it boils down to terminology.  Traditional photographers that lived in a darkroom (like me) used words like dodge and burn, or sponge, for instance. It might sound like  gibberish to someone raised in the digital environment, but they really shape how a traditional film photographer thinks about the development process.
Our Lightroom tutorial draws on this experience to make the transition as painless as possible.

A little more about the tutorial:

Jeff Witchel our InDesign expert continues his look into InDesign CS5 and in this short video tutorial Jeff takes a look at how you can create on-screen interaction with Adobe InDesign. Some people think of InDesign as just a page layout application, this video shows you can create documents for other media formats too. It’s just one example of the great training found in our full InDesign Video Course.

Exporting For On-Screen And Interactive

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Jeff Witchel our InDesign expert continues his look into InDesign CS5 and shows how to create a PDF document for going to print. He expands on even more topics in our 11-hour Learning InDesign Tutorial.

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Jeff Witchel our InDesign expert continues his look into InDesign CS5 and in this tutorial Jeff shows how to animate objects in Adobe InDesign, the easy way. It’s just one sample from our popular InDesign CS5 Tutorial on DVD.

Animating Objects in InDesign

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Jeff Witchel our InDesign expert continues his look into InDesign CS5 and in this tutorial Jeff shows how to add functionality with Buttons, he shows how to create a button from scratch and adds actions to it.

Creating Buttons

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Jeff Witchel our InDesign expert continues his look into InDesign CS5 and in this short video tutorial Jeff creates Neon Text without the need to use Photoshop. Adobe InDesigns ability to add such effects directly without the need for 3rd party programs really speeds up the workflow and with a little imagination jaw-dropping effects can be applied right from the program interface, as seen here. To get even more tips, see our complete InDesign CS5 tutorial video course.

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Jeff Witchel our InDesign expert continues his look into InDesign CS5 and in this tutorial he takes a look into adding feather effect to your images right from within InDesign, with no need to open Photoshop to alter the image.

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Jeff Witchel our InDesign expert continues his look into InDesign CS5. In this tutorial Jeff takes a close look at using InDesign to create gradients in your page layout. This is just a short extract from our tutorial videos on InDesign, please feel free to leave your comments and suggestions below.

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Jeff Witchel our InDesign expert continues his look into InDesign CS5. In this tutorial Jeff takes a look at the Gap Tool and how it will make designing professional looking page layouts easier. As always, he throws a few extra tips into the mix to help you on your way.

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