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.

There is more than one way to create an arrow using Illustrator. First, you can always draw your own arrow with the pen tool. Or, you might want to use a pre-designed arrow by using the Add Arrowheads filter or a brush or symbol. And finally, you can use an arrow design that is part of a font. To learn how to make an arrow, here are some good resources for you.

To create arrows:

• Add arrowheads to lines

• Create and reshape arrows and curved arrows (video tutorial)
• Use a symbol

These are the arrows you can use with the Symbol Tool. To get this palette, choose Window > Symbols to display the Symbols palette. Then from the Symbols palette pop up menu, choose Open Symbol Library > Arrows.

• Use a brush

These are some of the arrows you can use with the Brush Tool. To get this palette, choose Window > Brushes to display the Brushes palette. Then from the Brushes palette pop up menu, choose Open Brush Library > Arrows and choose one of the three libraries of arrow brushes.

• Use a font that contains arrow characters

To see if a font contains arrow characters, choose Window > Type > Glyphs. Select the font at the bottom of the palette and then scroll through the glyphs (characters) to search for arrows.

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.

Check out the Key Concepts Index page to see the full list with links and comments. If you find this helpful or have suggestions, leave us a comment. Here are the Key Concepts:

Special effects

• Blur
• Clone
• Filter
• Gradient
• Grayscale
• Panorama
• Sepia tone
• Vignette

Transformations

• Bounding box
• Crop
• Resample
• Resize
• Rotate
• Scale
• Skew
• Transform
• Warp

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

• What is Photoshop Elements?
• Getting photos from files and folders
• Getting photos from a digital camera

• Touring the Organizer interface
• Viewing photos
• Selecting photos
• Rotating photos
• Hiding and deleting photos
• Moving files

• Using the Guided Edit mode
• Touring the Full Edit interface
• Using tools
• Saving files
• Manual selection tools
• Automatic selection tools
• Using the new Smart Brush tool
• Converting color to black-and-white
• Creating text
• Editing text

• Making a photo book
• Making a photo collage
• Creating a slide show
• Making a panorama

• Using email and Photo Mail
• Printing your photos
• Signing up for Photoshop.com
• Viewing and sharing your photos online
• Backing up and synchronizing albums online
• Finding ongoing inspiration from Adobe.com

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.

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.

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.