In mid-December, just before I headed out to the Adobe World Wide Sales Conference, I was invited by my ad students and the coordinator of the Centennial College Advertising program to their portfolio review day. I accepted right away; I really wanted to see how much they had grown as digital professionals. Continue reading…
Adobe “Tutorial Builder” is like the “Harry Potter” of tutorial applications! This amazing application from Adobe Labs magically records your Photoshop knowledge into slick tutorials that can be shared via iPad. So…what’s so magical about it? Press the instructional link on the iPad and it will demonstrate the referenced step in Photoshop. This instructional hocus-pocus creates a communication channel between your tablet and a computer running Photoshop using the TouchSDK.
Tutorial Builder looks like a great application to add to your instructional “charm bag”!
Adobe has launched Adobe & Imagination Challenge, a new contest for students 15 years of age and older, encouraging them to show off their creative abilities with Adobe Creative Suite® 5.5 software products. Individual students who submit their creative pieces will have a chance to win $10,000. First prize winners in each of the four weekly judging sessions, and the grand prize winner, receive a $10,000 prize and will have their work showcased on Adobe.com! Work must be submitted online, where it will be featured for fellow students to vote on. The pieces will also be reviewed by a panel of professionals — including DeadMau5, Jake & Amir, Rivers Cuomo, and Scott Dadich — who will select the top 10 finalists for each of the weekly judging periods. Students in North America can submit entries from August 21 to October 15, 2011, for weekly judging. Let your students know about this rewarding opportunity to express themselves and show off their talents with CS5.5 tools. |
In the previous post, I talked about using Fireworks to create multiple application icons for an Android device, and then how to export those multiple icons as individual flat files.
In this post, we’ll look at how to batch process those larger images into three different sizes, and how to automate that process for future work. The original icons were created quite large – 244 pixels square, to be exact. This made it easy to be very detailed when creating the look of the icons. And while this is useful from and editing and creative perspective, the project requires three sets of smaller dimension icons for an Android application. Well, Fireworks excels at this type of workflow and produces very small files to boot. Continue reading…
Adobe Education Leaders (AELs) in front of a portable green screen
Before we were made to reappear in the magic box and be reunited with our friends and loved ones David appeared in person back stage with all of us! David quickly told us he would give each of us a personalized autographed photo of himself in exchange for our life-long swearing of total secrecy of how he did the trick. All twelve of us happily agreed and promised David we would never ever tell anyone how he did this trick; to this day fifteen years later I never have – even to my wife or kids who have begged me repeatedly to divulge all. So what does this have to do with Premiere Elements? – read on.
What’s interesting is some of the earliest silent film makers were previously stage magicians before they hand cranked a film camera. In fact one the earliest projection apparatus even before film cameras and film projectors were invented was called a “Magic Lantern,” a tin lamp-like device with a concave mirror, lens and an oil lamp or candle inside of it which was used as the light source to project a still image on to a screen or wall.
We’ve come a long, long way since the eras of the early stage magicians and first film makers who magically made things disappear and reappear on their limelight lit stages or in their early hand cranked films shown in picture palaces. In the case of the silent film makers to make say an actor magically disappear or appear in a scene it simply came down to scratching the actor’s image out of the nitrate film with a sharp blade.
In this digital age we are all a part of right now we are stunned by the digital CGI (Computer Generated Imagery) magic of the likes of James Cameron’s award winning film “Avatar,” or a flim like I saw last night; Rise of the Planet of the Apes and other amazing movies and television series that use state-of-the-art 3D techniques, or compositing tricks to create the illusion that different elements are all parts of the same scene to make things magically disappear or reappear in scenes.
Now you might be thinking to create this same kind of CGI magic for your own movie projects is not only super expensive, but most likely really hard to do – not at all. In fact with Premiere Elements it is as simple as shooting two clips of video, dragging & dropping them into Premiere Elements timeline and then clicking the mouse just once to achieve the same kind of CGI compositing magic of a James Cameron or making things appear or disappearing like David Copperfield on a live stage. Note in Premiere elements we call this cool trick “Video Merge,” but it also goes by a few other names like: Blue or Green Screen, Chroma Key and Compositing.
I’ve created two short Adobe Captivate screen capture demonstrations of how to do a basic Video Merge effect with Premiere Elements as well as a bit more advanced features and posted the demos to YouTube. Check out Part 1 or Part 2 (links below) to learn how you too can become a CGI magician in just a few mouse clicks using Premiere Elements Video Merge!
Part 1: Movie Magic with Adobe Premiere Elements Video Merge
Part 2: Creating Video Merge effects with Adobe Premiere Elements
IU Digital Imprint
Using the Digital Publishing Suite, Indiana University has created an iPad app - IU Libris – with three publications available for download.
Take a look on iTunes
I love food. I love Adobe technologies.
Martha Stewart’s “Everyday Food” , a cooking and lifestyle magazine, is now available on the iPad. This highly interactive magazine was put together using Adobe Digital Publishing technologies. Check it out!
Also check out the Adobe Digital Publish blog. http://blogs.adobe.com/digitalpublishing/
Adobe InDesign is no longer “just” a desktop publishing tool; it has turned into a full-blown multimedia machine! As a former teacher and educational technologist, I highly recommend adding InDesign CS5 to your instructional technology tool bag.
The following tutorial demonstrates how easy it is to build path animations using InDesign CS5. Imagine how much more engaging a lesson on diffusion would be if a student could animate the process rather than simply read about it!
Video 1 – Learn how to create a simple path animation using InDesign CS5
Video 2 – Create a path animation and add duration and timing settings
Valhalla High School teacher Mike Skocko keeps learning exciting and in balance in his Mac Lab.
When it comes to learning Adobe software and technologies there is a fantastic cornucopia of terrific choices out there: great books, in-person seminars, online webinars, weekend hands on intensives and much, much more. I’m a visual learner so when it comes to my own way of learning Adobe tools I tend to gravitate towards one of the super online video offerings from companies like: KelbyTraining.com, VTC.com, TotalTraining.com, AtomicLearning.com, Lynda.com or our very own Adobe TV.
With the exception of Adobe TV mentioned above all of these training companies offer deep discounted education pricing to educators who subscribe to their offerings and in my humble opinion they are a super value. But what if I told you there is another source of terrific online video training available on Adobe tools and to access the videos it won’t cost you a dime?
Enter amazing prolific powerhouse Mike Skocko (pronounced skotch-ko) of Valhalla High School in El Cajon California who has produced and posted over 3,000 online video tutorials (no that’s not a typo – 3,000 and counting!) covering a wide range of Adobe tools and technologies. Best part, they’re totally FREE to watch and learn from. In fact Mike already has close to 300 videos on many of the current Adobe CS5 tools posted online and adds new ones daily.
Mike stated to me recently (and in the most humble way) he would have had near five hundred videos posted on the Adobe CS5 tools by now but since he was recently derailed by being accepted into Adobe’s Education Leaders (AEL) program and simultaneously started work on a Masters Program along with his fulltime teaching duties at Valhalla High, he’s only been able to add one video tutorial post per day. One per day!? Five per week!? Twenty per month!? Are you kidding me Mike!? I’m lucky if I can find the time to write three blog posts here on the Adobe Education Technologies Blog per month! So now dear blog readers you know why Mike has been picked by me as a Prolific Powerhouse Person here on our blog.
I encourage you to check out Mike’s excellent videos on Adobe’s software tools and share this great and free learning resource with your students and education associates far and wide.
The Mac Lab’s Online Adobe Software Tutorials can be found HERE.
Check out a cool interview Mike conducted with one of his former Students HERE.
We’re excited to finally announce Project ROME for Education. Available as a pilot program for school districts, Project ROME for Education lets students and educators express, collaborate and communicate ideas using graphics, photos, text, video, audio and animation in a simple, unified content creation and publishing environment to enhance the learning experience. Project ROME for Education is designed specifically for students in classroom settings.
If you are interested in having your school district or institution participate, please go to http://rome.adobe.com/education and register. Eligibility criteria must be met for program acceptance. A member of the Adobe Education will contact qualified applicants with further information. Those in education who wish to try out Project ROME for Education individually can also go to http://rome.adobe.com/education to download the offering as part of the free preview program.
Check back here soon for much more information on Project Rome for Education!