Illustrator CS4 Help is live in several more languages

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

Illustrator CS4 and InDesign CS4 online Help is live

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!

Photoshop shortcuts and PDF advice

Photoshop Shortcuts
Did you know that there are more than 100 keyboard shortcuts in Photoshop? I’m not sure what the exact count is but it is an overwhelming amount. This fact has inspired my friend Deke McClelland to produce a short video called, “101 Photoshop Tips in 5 minutes.” He plays fast and loose with the math—he shows more than 101 shortcuts and the video is actually 8:33 minutes long—but who cares? It’s fun and funny, even if the music is truly awful (sorry Deke). I’ll bet you learn at least one new keyboard shortcut when you watch this.

Stupid PDFs
For more learning fun from some other funny guys, check out, “Stop Stupid PDF Syndrome.” Tim Cole and Rufus Deuchler, both InDesign experts and evangelists at Adobe, have created a “public service announcement” style video to teach people how NOT to create pdfs. It’s an excellent and entertaining way to teach people how to avoid creating pdf files that are device-dependent. These files result in lower quality output and can create serious color management problems. For more InDesign insight and tips, check out Tim’s InDesign blog.

Creative Lines with the Pen Tool for Photoshop & Illustrator

Once you’ve mastered the pen tool in Illustrator or Photoshop, you’re going to want a variety of lines to use for different types of illustrations. Here is a good selection of tutorials to get you started. For borders and maps, you may want to learn how to create dashed and layered lines. If so, there’s a good video tutorial called Dashed Lines by Dave Cross. For neon lines, see the tutorial by Meghan Murphy called Night Lights: Creating a glowing effect in Illustrator. Learn how to create thick and thin lines with Todd Ferris’ video called Adding Personality to Cartoon Lines. The Spoon Graphics blog has a nice tutorial on Creating Road Maps in Illustrator.

Using the pen tool in Photoshop is similar but not exactly the same as Illustrator. Here’s a tutorial on creating line art in Photoshop by acaraluv. Sometimes you need to illustrate lots of hair. Here’s a Hair Tutorial with the pen tool. Veerle shows us how to create thick and thin lines with Creating simple art brushes in Illustrator.

Are you new to the pen tool? Whether you use Photoshop or Illustrator, most of the basics are the same. Learn how to start using it with Matthew Richmond’s video Using the Pen Tool. Once you’ve seen that, try practicing with Veerle’s Illustrator Pen Tool Exercises. Remember, practice makes perfect! Be patient and persevere—you’ll master the pen tool before you know it!

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.

PDF forms: more tutorials

My previous post about creating Acrobat forms was very, very popular so I’ve decided to add another set of excellent tutorials for you to try. For starters, learn how to create forms automatically with Lori DiFurio’s, “Automating Form Field Creation.” To create a form from a Microsoft Word document, Lori shows you how in her tutorial, “Creating Basic Fillable Forms.” If you have created a form that requires calculations, look at Lori’s tutorial, “Adding Formatting and Calculations to PDF forms.” In this video tutorial she has created an order form that automatically calculates the price of whatever the user selects.

Keywording in Lightroom–an insider’s tips

If you’re processing loads of images in Lightroom, you will probably be using loads of keywords. One of the engineers on the Lightroom team, Eric Scouten, has written a really helpful tutorial about keywords in the Lightroom team blog. As you can see in the image above, some of the keywords that are really important to me have to do with colors. One of the tips I liked the best was that he reminded me of the option of importing your keywords from a text file. If you are using a big list of keywords, it’s much easier to type them up in a text file and then import them into Lightroom.

For more info on using keywords, Scott Kelby has a nice tutorial posted on Adobe Design Center. For more info about keyword synonyms, look at this blog entry by Johann Gudbjargarson.  Finally, did you know that you can access Lightroom Help online? Yep! Why would you want to do this? Because it’s live, it is the most up to date version of Help. Also, it allows for comments and questions from the community. Check out the Help pages about Keywording.

Welcome to my world…

… of design, illustration, and digital imaging at Adobe Systems. I’m Luanne Seymour and I work at Adobe Systems as a senior instructional designer. I work on lots of interesting projects here at Adobe–most having to do with finding effective ways of presenting instructional content so that people can learn how to use our products. My group recently finished up a huge project related to the CS3 launch. We created the CS3 Video Workshop. It’s an online Flex application that serves up video tutorials about the CS3 products.

I’m also one of the “authors” of Adobe’s Design Center. I, along with Jen deHaan, decide on the content that appears on Design Center. This blog is part of an effort to connect with Adobe’s huge community of creative professionals. I focus on the folks who use Photoshop, Lightroom, Illustrator, InDesign, and—to an extent—Acrobat. In other words, the people who are photographers, illustrators, artists, and designers. Jen focuses on the world of Flash, Dreamweaver, and the digital video and audio products. We’d like to get instructional content from you, the community. If you have a favorite instructional tutorial or video that you’d like to share, please send a comment to this blog.

In closing, I’d like to share with you a before & after image that I recently worked on in Lightroom.

Camera Raw Image as shot

Image after processing in Lightroom