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.

Here’s a quick tutorial from Andy Anderson on the Magnetic Lasso tool. It’s been a part of Photoshop for a very long time, and understanding what you can do with it will give you one more way to isolate specific areas of a photo for cropping them out or making adjustments.

First make sure you are in the Elements Editor, either Opened on its own or accessed from the Organizer as shown in the video below. Make sure you are in Expert mode.

Go to the Selections section of your side panel, and choose the icon with the small magnet at the top left of your screen.

The Magnetic Lasso is able to detect the edges of objects in your image in a single layer based on contrast: color and light. That means this tool works particularly well in cases where you have an object that stands out against its background. In this case, we are selecting and adjusting the color of a bright pink flower in front of green leaves.

All you need to do is click the edge of the object once to get started. As you slowly drag your mouse along the edge, the tool drops stop points in place along the detected border, even if you’ve got shaky hands. You have the option of setting more points on your own by clicking one time for each.

If you need to remove the last stop point created, simply hit the Delete or Backspace key. To finish making the selection, bring our mouse back to your starting point or double-click for Photoshop’s best guess.

This is a basic tool, but this video is one of our most popular Photoshop lessons on YouTube! Once you have learned all of the major selection methods, you will be able to judge which one is the right tool for a given job.

In this video, InfiniteSkills author Guy Vacarro shows how to create a macro in Microsoft Project 2013, showing you how to record a quick formatting procedure for adjusting the font in a sheet. It’s a sample from our new Microsoft Project 2013 Tutorial Video course.

From the VIEW tab, you just go to the Macros icon, click and select the Record Macro selection.

You’ll then see a dialog box that will give you multiple options for naming and configuring your macro before recording. Guy walks you step by step, through choosing a sensible naming convention, to choosing whether the macro will be global or local to the sheet, to choosing between relative and absolute references.

In this tutorial, you will learn how to create a universal whole-sheet macro for font formatting. Once you click OK on the Record Macro settings dialog, all actions you perform will become part of your macro.

Once you are finished, you go back to the Macros icon in the ribbon and select Stop Recording.

This is just one free video sample from the complete Project 2013 training course. Several more can be found on the product page.

     This post is part of a new series for the InfiniteSkills blog in which we deliver recommended excerpts from our courses with additional notes and commentary to help you get started. If there are any videos you would like to be featured, feel free to reach out to us in the comments or on our Facebook page!

     Microsoft Outlook 2013 provides more options for automation and shortcuts than any other version in the past. For a productivity tool, this is a no brainer, and while over the years they have improved in this area, the newest version probably hits the sweet spot for having the interface integrate seamlessly with built-in shortcuts and commands.

     In this Outlook tutorial, our instructor Erin Olson shows you how to work with rules for managing messages. This is not a new feature for the program, but it’s an extremely useful one that can help you rein in the chaos that comes with most inboxes, especially if you have more than one account.

     The first and perhaps easiest way to create a rule is by right-clicking and using the Rules context menu. You can instantly choose to Always Move Messages from the selected address, the Create Rule option which lets you further specify alerts, or the Manage Rules & Alerts Option, which is the most powerful of the three.

     These three selections are also available from the Home ribbon by going up to the Rules icon. In the following video, Erin shows how to set rules, how to edit them, and how to manage multiple rules according to hierarchy.

     You’ll see how Outlook can automate the process of sorting important messages into the folders you choose, and provide you with additional alerts and resources when you receive a message from prioritized addresses.

     This is just one video from our 10-hour Microsoft Outlook 2013 Tutorial Video – Training course, now available as a download, on DVD-ROM, or within our iOS app.