I’m pleased to report that my status as an Adobe Community Expert has been renewed for another year. The Community Expert program is a way by which Adobe rewards folks like myself that spend time volunteering online to help other users. There are lots of benefits to being in the program, but the two biggest for me are that I have a connection to other experts, many of whom I’ve become friends with, and an insider access to Adobe, which is where I can get all of my up-to-date information (although often that information is covered by the non-disclosure agreement I signed when I first joined the program, so it’s not always information I can share.)
Archive for the ‘Adobe’ Category
Sierra MMUG Meeting – Weds. Feb 4, 6:30 PM Pacific – Adobe Video Tools
Tomorrow night is the monthly meeting of the Sierra MMUG, the Sacramento region’s Adobe user group.
This month, we’ll be doing an overview of Adobe’s video tools. We’ll be looking at recording live video using OnLocation, editing video in Premiere Pro, editing audio in Soundbooth, adding effects in After Effects, and finally creating menus and burning a DVD in Encore.
If you’ll be in the Sacramento area, please join us. If not, feel free to join us online. Details of both the location of the meeting and the URL to log in online are on the group’s website.
Wow, I’m on Adobe TV
Adobe has posted most, or possibly all, of the sessions from MAX, including as it turns out mine! Pretty cool. So if you would like to watch it, you can do so on the Adobe TV site.
New Features in Photoshop CS4
So I have to admit that I may have been a tiny bit wrong about Photoshop CS4. OK, I was very wrong. I’ve been telling a lot of people recently that there are a ton of reasons to consider upgrading to CS4 … if you use Dreamweaver, Flash, Fireworks, or Illustrator. But if you’re a Photoshop user, well, I hadn’t really seen much to be impressed with.
Well, I was wrong. It turns out that there are a ton of really great enhancements in Photoshop. The problem, I think, is that none of them are terribly flashy. But that doesn’t make them any less impressive.
Something that’s been fairly frustrating for me throughout the whole transition to CS4 is that most of the things that are new in all of the programs are things that require me to rethink my workflow. Dreamweaver’s Live View, Live Code and Related Files features, for instance, have saved me more time than I can count, but it took some time to get it stuck in my head, because in order to use them, I had to change the way I do things. The new animation model in Flash and the Motion Editor have likewise forced me to rethink my entire approach to creating animation. And I’ll admit that I still don’t think of Fireworks first when I need to wireframe a web site, but I’m trying to get there.
Photoshop’s new features fall into the same category. I haven’t really discovered them because I’ve been trying to use Photoshop the way I always used it in the past. But now I need to take a new approach to a lot of things, and that’s going to take some getting used to. But it will be worth it. Just as I can’t count the hours I’ve saved thanks to my new workflows in Dreamweaver and Flash, I know now that forcing myself to relearn how I edit images in Photoshop will be worth the effort.
Okay, now I know you’re sitting there, screaming at your screen, “JUST TELL ME THE FREAKING FEATURES ALREADY!” Well, you really shouldn’t yell at your screen. I can’t hear you, and it will hurt your monitor’s feelings. Besides, I have no intention of telling you what the features are. I know, it’s mean. It’s partially because it’s a little bit late, and I really want to go watch Grissom’s final episode of CSI, but mostly it’s because I don’t have to. Instead, I’m going to let Scott Kelby do it. Enjoy!
P.S.: Here’s the link to the second and third parts of the series. As of when I’m writing this, he hasn’t posted the fourth part yet.
Edit: They have now posted part four.
A million thanks to the members of the Sierra MMUG
We held the December meeting of my Adobe user group last night. I had asked the people if they wanted to do something party-ish or just have a normal presentation-based meeting, and they voted for the later, so I did a preso on using Flash, After Effects, Soundbooth and Photoshop to create an animated greeting card.
It’s been a tradition of ours to encourage members to bring an unwrapped toy to the December meeting that we then donate to the Toys for Tots program. Last night, I ended up being about fifteen minutes late for my meeting (yet another time when I’m very glad to have a co-manager…) and when I did arrive, I was taken aback by my group’s generosity: there was a really big stack of toys laid out a table. Not only that, but they were *nice* toys – a stack of games like Battleship and Sorry, a couple of dolls, even a fairly big playset.
So there are going to be a bunch of kids that will have a better holiday season this year thanks to the group, and as I said in the subject, it’s a day that makes me proud to be associated with these folks.