My personal 'Ultimate, Awesome!' resource compendium (Part 2)
On my last post, I outlined some of the PC and Mac places I like as well as all things After Effects. This week, I'll take on Photoshop with my confession on Illustrator as an extra.
NAPP - The National Association of Photoshop Professionals. Wow, what a mouthful, but also what a great organization dedicated to all things Photoshop. When I joined Adobe, I called to get the Photoshop User magazine and initially read it cover to cover. In a large way, NAPP is who taught me Photoshop. If you're curious about Photoshop, or use it in a utilitarian fashion and want to get deeper, then there is no other resource I can recommend more highly. While I'm at it, one of the contributors to the mag is none other than Adobe's Terry White.
There are a tremendous number of resources that are available for Photoshop and they're nearly all free. NAPP has a bunch of podcasts and TV bits and there's a lot of tutorials available on Adobe TV as well. A couple of not so obvious recommendations follow:
Abduzeedo - Abducted by Design - He has some great Photoshop chops and an eye for cool design. What's nice is that he puts out a number of tutorials that are inspiring. Definitely worth bookmarking in my opinion.
The catch all site? Good-Tutorials.com brags that it contains tens of thousands of Photoshop tutorials. Frankly, I don't have enough time to call them on that, but it does seem as if they have a LOT of tuts for you to peruse. ;-)
If you're into Photoshop brushes, textures and the like, there are a lot of resources for you to check out. Typically, you can just google "Photoshop brushes" and turn up a number of entries. One I've used in the past is Photoshopbrushes.com
On the subject of Illustrator I confess my relative ignorance of this fantastic product. People think that Adobe people automatically know all of our products - that's not true. By the way, have you ever heard of LiveCycle? Thought so. Anyway, on the subject of learning Illustrator, I've got some of the basics, but my goal is to get much further along and so in addition to tackling Classroom in a book, I'm going to spend some time with quality books and vids by Mordy Golding. Mordy is a former product manager for the product and knows Illustrator like Russell Brown knows Photoshop
Is there a lot more? For sure. Honestly, there is so much out there that no one can really catalog it all. These are just a couple of the things that I've stumbled on over the years that have helped me or simply inspire me.