Share your Adobe workflow and win!

Have you figured out a great workflow with your Adobe products? You can win prizes for your hard-earned knowledge in the No App Is an Island contest!

Submit a tutorial that explains your multi-product workflow, and you could win a $100 Amazon.com gift card, or even the grand prize: a year’s membership to the Creative Cloud!

Adobe will also publish your tutorial and promote it on its social channels, giving you valuable publicity.

To enter, go to http://adobe.ly/QSsiHo. But don’t wait too long. The contest ends on November 15, 2012!

If you have any questions, please email CommunityHelp@adobe.com.

Adobe Carousel for iPhone, iPad, and Mac launches today!

Adobe Carousel, Adobe’s new app for the iPad, iPhone, and Mac launched today.  Imagine being able to see your entire digital photo library anytime you want on any of your digital devices. Carousel allows you to view and edit your photos on your iPhone, iPad and your Mac. It syncs any changes or edits you make automatically so the images will look the same no matter which device you are using. Here are some links to learn more about it:

• Product specs and prices
• Getting started with Carousel
• Carousel for the Mac – Mac App store
• Carousel for iOS – App store
• Carousel forum
• Carousel Help & Support

What will Adobe Help and learning be like in the future?

Come to the Adobe MAX conference in Los Angeles next week and sign up for my session with Jaydeep Dutta. We’ll be showing our vision for the future of help and learning for Adobe products. Here’s the info:

Social Studies: Connecting Content and Community in the Cloud
Come see how a few simple UX design patterns can facilitate a shared, social learning experience that blurs the boundaries between inspiration and instruction, as well as between content and community. Three trends are currently sweeping digital media: Tablets are moving from content consumption to creation, social features are increasingly pervasive, and everything is shifting to the cloud. Join us to explore how this trifecta creates exciting opportunities for designers and developers, and to examine our own promising effort at taking advantage of these trends.

When: Wednesday, 10/5, at 2:30 pm
Where: Room 511A
Speakers: Jaydeep Dutta, Luanne Seymour

Browse all of your photos on iPhone, iPad, and your Mac

Adobe just announced a new product for anyone who loves photos called Adobe Carousel. If you have one set of photos on your iPhone, and another set on your Mac, and still another set on your iPad, now you can unite them into one “carousel” that is accessible from any of those devices. Want to learn more about it? Here are some links to videos and FAQs that will tell you all about this amazing new product.

• Watch the announcement and demo of Adobe Carousel at Photoshop World
• Learn all about the product on Photoshop.com and watch a short video that explains the idea behind Adobe Carousel
• To ask questions and learn more, go to the Adobe Carousel Community feedback page. Carousel product team members are on hand to answer questions and have a conversation with the community.

Create your own Adobe tutorial

Many people who use Adobe’s products have a huge amount of experience and expertise to share. What’s really inspiring to me is to see a very cool image that someone created and then have them walk me through how they did a particular technique. Are you one of those people? If so, you might be interested in creating a tutorial using Adobe’s new Community Publishing System. Your tip or tutorial will end up on Adobe.com. Here’s what you do:

1. Download the Community Publishing AIR app.
2. Use one of the prebuilt templates or upload your content in any form you wish.
3. Your content will show up in content searches when people are looking for help for Adobe products. It might even be linked to from the product Help and Support pages.

You can find more information about Community Help here.

 

Adobe’s Creative Suite 4 announcement

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.

Russell Brown wins an Emmy

Congratulations to my longtime friend Russell Preston Brown for winning an Emmy for his instructional videos! I’m so proud of him! If you haven’t seen his videos yet, tune in to Adobe TV to watch some of them. For example, to learn about the 3D tools in Photoshop CS3, watch his 3-D Whales Experiment. Is he wacky? Yes. Is he goofy? Yes. Will you learn from him? Absolutely, yes. Russell makes it fun to learn how to do things in Photoshop. Go ahead, try it. So what if you don’t want to make a 3-D whale—you’ll still learn how to use the tools—and isn’t that the point? Russell has even more tutorials on the X-Train site. There are some for free and some you’ll have to pay for.

For other great instructional videos, check out the Adobe Video Workshop. You can learn from Russell about Animating Layer Properties, Cloning Content Across Multiple Frames, and Working with Video Layers in Photoshop CS3. Great job, Dr. Brown!

My blog 2.0

This blog is having a bit of a facelift today. Until now it has been focused on providing useful information on how to learn many of Adobe’s creative products. That focus is about to become finer. From now on, I’ll mostly be giving you information on great learning resources for our digital imaging products (Photoshop, Lightroom, Photoshop Express). I’ll probably throw in a post or two about Illustrator here and there since so many people use Photoshop and Illustrator together for their illustration work. I will keep the old posts archived since some of my old posts are still very popular. For today, I’d like to share a link to a really interesting article I read in yesterday’s New York Times. Virginia Heffernan discusses the effect that Flickr has had on the art of photography.

Lightroom 2.0 beta launches

Lightroom 2.0 beta launches
Are you ready for the next generation of Lightroom? Here it comes! How do you get it? Go to AdobeLabs.

Who is eligible for the Lightroom 2.0 beta? All Lightroom 1.0 customers. Lightroom 1.0 customers can download and install Lightroom 2.0 beta for use throughout the beta program. What about customers new to Lightroom? Anyone can download the Lightroom 2.0 beta and try it for 30 days. And here’s something that you rarely get with beta software: video tutorials! Lynda.com will have Lightroom 2.0 beta video tutorials so you can learn how to use the new features.

You can get a list of the new features on the Lightroom team blog.

Funny Photoshop; Photoshop Express

Photo by Charlie Cohen

Funny Photoshop Tutorials
Can you learn while laughing? Of course! Humor is a very effective teaching tool, and the folks at MyDamnChannel.com know it. If you aren’t offended by a bit of crass humor and foul language, you can learn some good stuff from “Donnie Hoyle” in his “You Suck at Photoshop” series of videos. I highly recommend them.

Photoshop Express launches
Want to do some quick online editing and share your photos? Check out Photoshop Express. You certainly don’t have all the functionality that you get in Photoshop, but it is pretty handy for posting snapshots for friends and family. Have a peek at two different albums that I created. I processed the images in Lightroom and then exported them as jpgs before uploading them to Photoshop Express. To download a free chapter of a new book on Photoshop Express, go to the Peachpit Press site. You can also find out what Matt Kloskowski’s favorite Photoshop Express features are. If you want to learn from videos, NAPP has 19 video tutorials to help you learn to use Photoshop Express.