Adobe Education Technologies

Photoshop Lightroom,BETA,Adobe Labs

We here at the Adobe Education Technologies blog like to think of ourselves as amateur photographers (except for Rick—who is a real photographer, but the rest of us try to keep up). We are all VERY excited bout the next release of Adobe Photoshop Lightroom—version 3 BETA, and you can see it yourself on Adobe labs: (link to the Labs Lightroom 3 BETA site)

Some of the new features included for you to play with in the Lightroom 3 beta are:

• Brand new performance architecture, building for the future of growing image libraries
• State-of-the-art noise reduction to help you perfect your high ISO shots
• Watermarking tool that helps you customize and protect your images with ease
• Portable sharable slide shows—with audio—designed to give you more flexibility and impact on how you choose to share your images, you can now save and export your slide shows as videos and include audio
• Flexible customizable print package creation so your print package layouts are all your own
• Film grain simulation tool for enhancing your images to look as gritty as you want
• New import handling designed to make importing streamlined and easy
• More flexible online publishing options so you can post your images online to certain online photo sharing sites directly from inside Lightroom 3 beta

Read on for more resources and information about the next release of one of our Adobe favorites:

Continue reading "Lightroom 3 is in Beta and available for you to try" »

Posted by Timothy Plumer Jr at 5:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Adobe Digital School Collection,ADSC,Photoshop Elements,Premiere Elements,teacher resources,curriculum,lesson plans,netbooks

The lesson plans on the Adobe Digital School Collection teacher resources web page have been updated to include sample project assets and technical guides for the new release of Adobe Photoshop Elements 8 and Adobe Premiere Elements 8. There is also a new resource page tailored for Adobe Photoshop Elements 8 and netbooks. Finally, the Adobe Education SE team is hard at work creating video tutorials taking you through some of the lesson plans/projects. These can be found on Adobe TV.

Posted by Patrick Koster at 12:01 PM | Permalink

There is a storm brewing, folks, and it isn't going to just blow over. As fuel prices (here in the US anyway) start the uphill, summer climb, budgets for travel sink lower, and the amount of work we need to accomplish at very best stays the same, we need to figure out how to do our jobs while working with our colleagues around campus or around the globe. We here at the Adobe Education Technologies blog have been asked to do more of our work from home, and we love it! However, it is difficult to confer and present with colleagues because we often need to edit the presentation together, yet there is no way to justify the trip across the country to do so. When the economy turns around, among the strewn bits of jetsam that any storm leaves, we need to find a better ways to work corroboratively, pick them up, and use them make our work more efficient in any economy.

Adobe is noticing this along with everyone else—and we are doing something about it. The latest effort has me floored. It's called Adobe Presentations and it's a true software as a service (SaaS) product. If you have ever worked with PowerPoint or Keynote, then you will know what it does. However, it's the "how-it-does-it" that has us floored. First off, you can give it a spin by going to the new labs site of Acrobat.com. Link to Adobe Presentations. Take a look at the Welcome presentation sample that you can use to get started (this a PDF exported from that presentation and uploaded to SHARE):

However, to understand how this will become a new port in the coming storm, read on.

Continue reading "Adobe == Collaboration" »

Posted by Timothy Plumer Jr at 5:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Adobe Education Technologies,Adobe Photoshop Elements,auto adjustments,smart fix,color correction,levels,exposure,contrast,sharpening,red eye removal,cropping,rotation

After importing photos into the Adobe Photoshop Elements Organizer you may need to make adjustments to ensure your photos look their best. You can quickly and effectively resolve common photo issues with a single click of a button. Simply choose the purple Fix tab located in the upper-right of your screen.

Continue reading "Quickly Fix Common Photo Issues with Adobe Photoshop Elements" »

Posted by Patrick Koster at 3:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Adobe Education Technologies,Photoshop Elements,Photomerge,Photo Compositing

Just in case you aren't familiar with photo compositing, this technique combines two or more photos into a single new photo. Some examples where this technique would be useful are:

• combining multiple photos to create a more expansive (panoramic) final photo
• creating the perfect group photo from multiple photos
• creating the perfect scenic photo from multiple photos eliminating unwanted elements (like people)

Adobe Photoshop Elements offers powerful, yet easy-to-use Photomerge technology to make these difficult and time-consuming tasks a snap. Here are three Photomerge tutorials (note 5-10 sec pause at the beginning for buffering):

• Photomerge Panorama
• Photomerge Group Shot
• Photomerge Scene Cleaner

Try Photomerge for yourself. If you don't currently own Adobe Photoshop Elements, download the latest trial version from Adobe's website!

Regards,
Patrick Koster
Senior Solution Engineer, Adobe Education

Posted by Patrick Koster at 9:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Kuler,Illustrator,Color,Community Pulse

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).

Continue reading "Kule New Feature in Kuler!" »

Posted by Timothy Plumer Jr at 10:24 AM | Permalink

Posted by Timothy Plumer Jr at 5:54 AM | Permalink

XFL,Adobe InDesign CS4,Adobe Flash CS4 Professional

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" »

Posted by Patrick Koster at 5:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

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!" »

Posted by Patrick Koster at 1:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Posted by Timothy Plumer Jr at 5:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Greetings all,

In today's video blog I'll show you how to maintain the integrity of your colors when sending your images to the web from Adobe Photoshop CS3 and Adobe Lightroom 2.0.

Cheers!
Rick Miller

Video blog: Maintaining color fidelity when outputting to the web.

Posted by Rick Miller at 6:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)