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05.19.09

Are you just starting out with digital imaging? If you’re a beginner with digital photo-editing, you’ll need to understand some basic concepts. This isn’t always as easy as it should be. What if the beginner tutorial contains words or ideas that you haven’t learned yet? Are you wondering things like:

  • What is a “color cast”?
  • What’s the difference between “resize” and “resample”?
  • What does “sepia tone” mean?

If you want to learn about some of these basic ideas, Adobe is testing a new idea: Illustrated Key Concepts. Each page contains a definition of the basic concept, an illustration of the concept, related terms, and a list of related tools in Photoshop Elements. Once you’ve learned what a sepia tone image is, you can click on the tool name and learn how to create a sepia tone image using Photoshop Elements.

The pages also contain lots of other “related terms” to help people find the right page. Sometimes you may not know the correct term for something. These related terms are meant to help searchers get close. So, for example, if you wanted to find info on creating sepia toned images but you searched for “antique” photos, you could land on Sepia Tone page anyway.

The set of key concepts is a bit small right now and was just posted this week. But keep checking back to the Key Concepts Index page because more pages will be added on an ongoing basis. Here are the Key Concepts posted so far:

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Are you just learning to use Photoshop Elements 7? This set of videos should help you get started.

These Getting Started videos were created by Lynda.com. Adobe is offering this set of videos for free to help users get oriented to the software. For the complete set of videos, see the full title, “Photoshop Elements for Windows Essential Training” by Jan Kabili.

In addition to the Getting Started videos, Adobe is also offering a set of intermediate tutorials and videos to further your learning. I highly recommend working your way through the Getting Started videos before you tackle the “Learn More” set of tutorials.

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Just signing off for the year. I wanted to tell you that my posts will be less frequent from now on. I will still be posting occasionally when I find a really good topic with great tutorials to tell you about. For now, I highly recommend that you look to the following links for really great content that is being updated regularly:

Photoshop Help and Support

Bridge Help and Support

Lightroom Help and Support

Illustrator Help and Support

If you have great tutorials, try using the comment feature at the bottom of the Help pages to submit your content. If the writers like your work, they might include it in the documentation and give you credit!

Have a great holiday season. See you in 2009. Happy New Year!

Luanne Seymour
Sr Instructional Designer, Digital Imaging
Adobe Systems Inc.

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Adobe posted Illustrator CS4 Help on the Web in English a few weeks ago. (Here’s a link to the “What’s New in Illustrator CS4″ section.)

Now, the localized (i.e., translated) versions of online Help are available in German, French, Italian, Dutch, Chinese, Danish, Swedish, Spanish, and Korean.

German: Verwenden von Adobe Illustrator CS4

French: Utilisation d’Adobe Illustrator CS4

Italian: Utilizzo di Adobe Illustrator CS4

Spanish: Uso de Adobe Illustrator CS4

Dutch: Adobe Illustrator CS4 gebruiken

Chinese simplified: 使用 Adobe Illustrator CS4

Chinese Traditional: 使用 Adobe Illustrator CS4

Korean: Adobe Illustrator CS4 사용

Danish: Bruge Adobe Illustrator CS4

Swedish: Använda Adobe Illustrator CS4

Adobe has just posted Illustrator CS4 Help on the web and InDesign CS4 Help on the web. Take a look!

Illustrator CS4 has some cool new features such as a new Illustrator workspace, multiple artboards, and the Blob Brush tool. Click here to see an overview of the new Illustrator features, with links to detailed topics on each feature.

InDesign CS4 has great new features like live preflight, smart guides, and page transitions. Click here to see an overview of all the new InDesign features, with links to detailed topics on each feature.

Because this is beta Help, some features of Help are not yet active, such as links to video tutorials and other Help documents. When CS4 ships, all features of Help will work properly. The quality of search results will improve as these new pages are crawled by Google – so click lots of links!

Here is more info about the new Adobe Community Help system—one of the best new features of CS4!

Adobe has just posted Photoshop CS4 and Bridge CS4 Help on the web. They still have some work to do and bugs to fix, but I thought you might like to take an early peek.

You can read an overview of the new Photoshop features or an overivew of what’s new in Bridge CS4.

Or, if you want to skip straight to the good stuff in Photoshop, read about the new Adjustments panel, masking layers, and how to make local adjustments in Camera Raw.

For Bridge, read about the new Review mode, about creating web galleries with the Adobe Output Module, and saving searches as Smart Collections.

Note that links to video tutorials and to some other Help documents are not functional yet, and commenting isn’t turned on. This will be fixed when CS4 ships. Search works now, and the quality of the results should improve as these new pages are crawled by Google.

TIP: Download the PDF from the upper-right corner of any Help page on the web. The PDF is great for when you’re offline or want to print a version of Help.

And finally, here is more info about the new Adobe Community Help system, in general.

Enjoy.

Want to experience Adobe’s big product announcement on September 23rd? At 9:00 AM PDT click this link and enjoy the show! To sign up for the web cast, click here.

Are you trying to learn how to use your new copy of Lightroom 2.0? Adobe has posted a set of video tutorials to help you do just that. There’s something for everyone here. For an excellent set on how to get started in Lightroom 2.0, look at Matt Kloskowski’s set of 15 video tutorials. If you’ve just upgraded from Lightroom 1.0, check out Julianne Kost’s set of “What’s New in Lightroom 2.0?”. You can find all the videos on the “Getting Started with Lightroom 2.0” page on Adobe.com.

Last night at 9 pm PST, Lightroom 2.0 finally shipped. Yippee!!! You can find out more about the new features on Adobe’s Lightroom marketing page. If you want to watch some in-depth videos on the new features and updates, I recommend looking at Julieanne Kost’s videos. They are each a little over 20 minutes long and fairly detailed. So reserve an hour of your day, grab a cup of coffee, and check out these flicks:

Do you prefer reading about the new features instead of watching a video? You can look at a listing of all the new features in the new Lightroom Online Community Help. Here are a few highlights that you should definitely read up on:

This blog is really all about learning how to use Adobe’s digital imaging products so you might be wondering why I would write about Acrobat here. Well, if you’re a photographer, designer, or illustrator you might need to use Acrobat to present your work for review. Some of Acrobat 9’s new features are geared for just that. If you want to learn more about how to use the new Acrobat 9 software, there are more than 30 excellent video tutorials in the Adobe Video Workshop. (When you choose the product in the product selector, be sure to select Acrobat 9 family—not Acrobat 8). You’ll find tutorials on creating portfolios, forms, managing comments, conducting shared reviews, and much more.

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