The Adobe Education Technologies blog presents a fantastic new resource for faculty teaching digital video. The new Video Production Resource Center is a robust collection of sample projects, curriculum, professional development resources, tips & tricks, and more. You can also access video production resources for students with a wealth of free tutorials and inspiration from work created by their peers.
If you've never visited Adobe TV before or haven't been back for awhile, I highly suggest checking it out. Adobe TV is your "one stop shop" for free Adobe tutorials, demos, tips & tricks, and general design inspiration. There are various channels which are comprised of different programs, each with multiple episodes (short videos) to choose from - most are less than 5 minutes in length.
One of the goals of the Adobe Education Technologies blog is to provide access to Adobe resources in a concise form. Adobe.com has many great resources to help education IT departments deploy Adobe Creative Suite 4 across their enterprise, yet this information is not consolidated. So here you go:
Adobe Creative Suite Help and Support Home Page
http://www.adobe.com/support/creativesuite/
Adobe Creative Suite Forums
http://forums.adobe.com/community/creativesuites
Adobe Installation and Licensing Blog
http://blogs.adobe.com/OOBE/
Adobe Support Advisor
http://www.adobe.com/support/loganalyzer/
Adobe CS4 Deployment Toolkit and Guide
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/creativesuite/
Adobe CS4 Enterprise Manual Deployment Guide
http://www.adobe.com/aboutadobe/openoptions/pdfs/manualenterprisedeployment_cs4_help.pdf
Happy Installing!
Adobe, in partnership with Knowledge Network Solutions (KNS), is offering expert, instructor-led workshops that focus on integration of Adobe tools into all academic curriculum. The curriculum integration workshops include the use of Adobe Creative Suite and Adobe Digital School Collection software for innovative teaching of STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) topics as they relate across the academic curriculum. A staff development workshop addresses the use of Adobe Acrobat Connect and Adobe Presenter software to create and deliver your own rich, interactive staff development to widely dispersed educators. To learn more about this new offer along with terms and conditions please review our professional development web page and datasheet.
Continue reading "The Adobe Configurator for Photoshop CS4" »
Guest post by Jim Hoerricks, Forensic Image/Video Analyst.
(Jim Hoerricks is a Photoshop Instructor, an Author, and a court qualified expert witness in Forensic Video Analysis who also happens to work for a law enforcement agency in one of the US' major metropolitan areas)
I’ll start off today’s post by first thanking Rick Miller for inviting me to be today’s guest blogger, and by introducing myself. I’m Jim Hoerricks, Forensic Image / Video Analyst and best selling author of Forensic Photoshop – a comprehensive imaging workflow for forensic professionals (www.forensicphotoshopbook.com). I also blog at forensicphotoshop.blogspot.com. For more of my bio, check out the book’s link.
I’ve used Adobe products since the early/mid 1990’s. Some Adobe Products, like Pagemaker, I used before Adobe bought them from their respective owners.
Rick asked me to write a post about the Creative Suite and how it might benefit Criminal Justice students and practitioners. As always, I am happy to help.
So often, we think of Criminal Justice as laws, procedures, court cases, and lots of PT. (If you don’t know what PT stands for, get down and give me 20) I’m here to tell you that the state of modern policing is that … and much more. To illustrate my point, I’ll go down the list of Creative Suite products and show you how each piece fits perfectly within the Criminal Justice curriculum. By the time we’re done, I think that you’ll agree with me that owning the Creative Suite 4 Master Collection is the way to go.
Have you worked with Kuler yet? Before you read too much further, go try it out (link to Kuler).
You can also access it directly inside Adobe Illustrator CS4 as a way to get inspired about or just share color (see how). We here at the Adobe Education Technologies blog use it on occasion when we are looking for our own inspiration, and we were pleasantly surprised at the latest update to Kuler called Community Pulse.
The screenshot shows Community Pulse in action, namely the popularity of colors downloaded in the USA (l) and Brazil (r) in Spring 2008. Larger circles and bars indicate more popular colors (i.e., themes with those colors were downloaded more often).
In a previous Adobe Education Technologies blog article we examined how to use Adobe InDesign CS4 to create a visually rich layout, add interactivity with hyperlinks, buttons, and page transitions, and then export to SWF. We were able to do all of this without using Adobe Flash Professional and Actionscript programming. The downside of this direct-to-SWF export is that there isn't an easy way to edit the SWF file should we want to further modify it.
Now, Adobe InDesign CS4 allows designers to create multi-page layouts and then export to the new XFL (XML for Flash) file format. The XFL file can be opened directly in Adobe Flash CS4 Professional preserving layout and typographic fidelity. Then developers can enhance the file with animation, interactivity, and video. Let's take a look at the workflow:
Continue reading "XFL: Bringing Designers and Developers Together Since 2008" »
While there are many new outstanding features in Flash CS4 that are cool and flashy (e.g. Object-based animation model, 3D transformations, Inverse kinematics with the Bones tool, Adobe Media Encoder with H.264 support, and much more) don’t overlook a very simple feature that will save you a significant amount of time during the animation process: the Motion Presets panel.
Continue reading "Flash CS4: Motions Preset panel (Part 1)" »
When it comes to creating and sharing your personal or professional digital photo creations with the world there is no better tool or place to do so than with an Adobe tool or Adobe web based service. In this post on the Adobe Education Technologies Blog I'll cover some of our easy to use tools to get you started!
Continue reading "Creating Easy to Make and Share Photo/Web Galleries!" »
With each new release of Adobe Creative Suite there are features so fantastic that they warrant special mention on the Adobe Education Technologies blog. For this article I would like to focus on Adobe InDesign CS4 and its ability to quickly create and export interactive Flash (SWF) files.
In case you aren't familiar with Adobe InDesign, it is the leading page layout application enabling creative freedom along with precise control over graphics, typography, color, transparency, effects, and placed images. Though Adobe InDesign provides direct-to-print capabilities, many have used it to create PDF files which capture all design elements and can be shared and viewed with the free Adobe Reader. What has been missing was an easy way to create rich interactive content that could be viewed with the Adobe Flash Player. Click this link to view an example of what we can now build with Adobe InDesign CS4 (at 2MB it takes a few seconds to load, but is worth the wait - move your cursor over one of the page corners, click, and drag to turn the page): http://education.acrobat.com/idcs4toswf/
Let's examine how to create this Flash file!
Continue reading "The New InDesign CS4 Export to Flash is a Real Page Turner!" »
Go to Labs
Now that we have announced and we are showing CS4, you may want to get started. If so, go to the Adobe Labs website: http://labs.adobe.com. There you’ll find three of the CS4 applications in beta for you to try. Dreamweaver, Fireworks, and Soundbooth are there, and if you own Creative Suite 3 you can plop your CS3 serial number into the applications and run them until we release CS4 (sometime later in the quarter). One particular thing I recommend that you try is the Transcription feature in Soundbooth. It will turn your speech into text, and it’s incredibly easy to use. After you download the app and install it, follow these steps. . .
I am almost as excited as Steve Martin's character in The Jerk, when he danced around gleefully screaming, "The new phone books are here, the new phone books are here!" For those of you who don't share my taste in fine cinema - this is exciting! There are way too many fun, new toys to cover in a single post, but rest assured the team will be blogging about the wonders of CS4 soon. Till then I'll leave you with some fantastic resources on Adobe.com to get you acquainted with the new release;
Ciao.
You know that little graph in Photoshop, Lightroom, and on your digital camera called the Histogram? What does it tell you, and how can you use to rescue a boring photo? Watch my tutorial. We will cover this and check out some new features in Lightroom 2.0. Whoa, what about the FREE Lightroom pop quiz? Read on...
How to Create Flash eLearning without Major Programming
You love Flash and would like to create some cool eLearning quizzes with it, but aren’t ready to dive into learning Flash’s deep ActionScript programming language for your quizzes? Well guess what, you don’t have to be an ActionScript guru to create compelling Flash eLearning! Flash has a series of little known built-in eLearning “interactions” which you can create in no time without deep programming knowledge. Other than a few simple timeline stop frame actions, everything you do is drag, drop, and typing in your courseware questions and answers; there are even built-in buttons to check for the correct answers and also allow you to move on to the next quiz.
So how does this all work?