Basic photography questions explained

Ever wonder why your photos turn out too dark or too light? Or how to set up your camera to get crisp action shots? Or how to get that cool effect of having the background of your photo being soft and blurry with the foreground object being sharp and in focus? The Creative Cloud Learn team is experimenting with short videos about photography. They are part of a larger set of tutorials for Novice Photographers. These are totally worth checking out if you are just learning about digital photography:

• Why is my photo too light or dark?
• How do I control what’s in focus?
• How do I shoot a sharp photo?

Be sure to give us feedback on what you think of the tutorials and what other questions or topics you’d like us to cover.

Basic digital photography tutorials

Are you wanting to learn more about digital photography? This is a good place to start: Photography Tutorials. There are some very basic  2-minute tutorials here for novice photographers who are just getting started. If you are a total beginner and just want to learn a few really basic skills, check these out:

• Photography: Where to start
• Go retro: Convert to B & W
• Crop and level
• Create a panorama
• Remove that object
• Fearless photo edits
• Straighten up!
• Add words to your pictures
• Edit photos on the go

Learn the pen tool by playing a game

Having trouble learning to master the pen tool in Illustrator, Photoshop, or Flash? We’ve got just the thing! Get started learning pen tool basics by playing the Pen Tool Game. This cute and clever game let’s you practice drawing both straight and curved lines. If bezier curves have got you stumped, give this a try. Its fun! And you’ll be helping a wayward little space traveler named Weber find his way home.

Hint: drawing curved lines scores more points than straight ones.

Find the right tutorial faster with Adobe’s new Search

Adobe’s learning search has not been the greatest. We’ve wanted to fix it for a really long time and we’re really excited about our new redesign of tutorial search.

There are almost 1000 Creative Cloud app tutorials on Adobe.com, but they’re often too hard to find. This summer, the Learn team built a totally new tutorial search experience to help you get what you need faster. It just went live yesterday.

Here are some of the improvements:

• Search is now available on every tutorial page.
• Search results are totally redesigned to help you decide which tutorial works the best for you. On the results page you’ll find a whole new look.
• Each search result includes:
  • tutorial description
  • tutorial type:  video, text, hands-on, game
  • duration:  length of the tutorial or time to complete a hands-on project
  • apps covered
  • user level

Take a look:

Try it out for yourself!

Are you a Lightroom beginner?

Here’s a friendly place to get your questions about Lightroom answered. Adobe has just launched the Lightroom for Beginners forum. It’s chock full of great info on how to get started. There are also lots of friendly people there who are waiting to answer your questions, no matter how basic.

Are you a Photoshop Beginner? There’s a friendly place for you too. Check out the Photoshop for Beginners forum.

Learn Creative Cloud by playing a game

Here’s something interesting! Looks like these folks are trying to make a learning game for Creative Cloud. Click here if you want to learn more.

Creating animations with a hand-drawn look

One of the challenges of creating digital animations is making them look organic. Sometimes the result of a digital animation is just too smooth and perfect looking. There are ways around this if you are looking to give your animation a hand-drawn and organic feel. Ben Markus, one of our student interns last summer, has created a tutorial series that teaches you ways of using Photoshop and After Effects to give your animations a hand-drawn look. He starts with the basics so even a non-animator like me can create a really cool organic animation. Give it a try, its really fun!

Great new place to start learning Photoshop

Are you a Photoshop beginner? If so, the new Photoshop for Beginners forum is bound to be of help. Its a place to ask questions, learn the basics about Photoshop, and find answers from patient, knowledgeable people. Check it out and let me know what you think.

Learn Photoshop while playing

Play LevelUp for Photoshop, a new gamification approach to learning. Not only will you improve your image editing skills, but you may even win prizes. Download the free game. For more information, see the LevelUp for Photoshop Facebook page.

Getting started with digital imaging?

If you want to understand some of the basic concepts behind digital photography and editing digital images, you should check out these Key Concepts pages. Each one is a very quick read. I highly recommend taking a peek before you dive into learning how to use any of these programs. Here is the list of Key Concepts for Photoshop and Lightroom:

Digital image basics

• Aliasing & Anti-aliasing*
• Bounding box
• Canvas*
• Color mode or Image mode
• Compression
• Raster & Vector*
• Resolution
• Sample
• Zoom

Layers

• Adjustment layer*
• Flattening*

Photo adjustments

• Color cast
• Contrast
• Exposure
• Highlight & Shadow
• Lighten
• Saturation & Desaturation
• Sharpen

Special effects

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

Transformations

• Resample
• Skew*
• Transform
• Warp*

Here is the list of Key Concepts for Photoshop Elements 9:

Digital image basics

• Aliasing & Anti-aliasing
• Canvas
• Color mode or Image mode
• Compression
• Keywords
• Raster & Vector
• Resolution
• Sample
• Selection
• Zoom

Layers

• Adjustment layer
• Background
• Composite
• Flattening
• Layer
• Transparency & Opacity

Photo adjustments

• Color cast
• Contrast
• Exposure
• Highlight & Shadow
• Lighten
• Saturation & Desaturation
• Sharpen

Special effects

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

Transformations

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