Adobe Offers 45 Min Video For Photoshop Beginners

For those that are new to Photoshop the experience can quickly become overwhelming. Even with its much more friendly design and more intuitive tools Photoshop is still an immensely powerful program with a fairly steep learning curve. The sheer volume of features alone makes picking up even the basics in the application a daunting task for many users.

While most user might choose to jump right in, others will opt for searching the web for Photoshop tutorials or how to guides. However, even these can be confusing, enter Adobe's Terry White. Terry has put together an excellent 45 minute video showing you how to accomplish "10 Things Beginners Want to Know How To Do".

The video runs through a gamut of useful tools, like spot correction, layers and adjustment layers, cropping, fixing exposure and white balance, content aware fill, and more. So if that sounds like something you'd like to learn, carve yourself out a block of time, and get yourself an education.

Now for those of you who are advanced Photoshop geeks, obviously, this video isn't aimed at you, and even an intermediate user might find some of the content a bit redundant. But someone just starting out will probably find the videos Terry has created are invaluable—and the rest of us might just pick up a new method or two along the way, too.

If you like this video Terry has several more Adobe Creative Cloud Videos available on Adobe Creative Cloud TV or for more videos from other Adobe Evangelists and Experts checkout Adobe TV.

Add Fonts Into Photoshop Without Adding Them To Windows

If like me you use a ton of fonts for your Photoshop or Illustrator projects but you don't want to drag down the performance of other applications or you don't want to take the time to add them all to the Windows font folder then here is a quick easy way of adding them without facing these issues.

The trick is to put them into the Adobe common fonts folder under you program files folder (usually “C:\Program Files\Common Files\Adobe\Fonts\”) or if you are running a 64 bit OS such as Windows 7 64 bit (“C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\Adobe\Fonts\”).

You can get to this directory by going to Start > Run and issuing the following:

%ProgramFiles%\Common Files\Adobe\Fonts

This should bring you to a directory called “fonts”, from there you can either add all your fonts directly into that folder or an even better step is to create sub-folders for easier organization. Then you add in all the fonts you want to use in and they will be loaded when Photoshop loads. Just keep in mind the more fonts you add the longer it takes Adobe Photoshop to load all these fonts so it will slow down load times. The benefit however is that Windows and all your other font using applications will perform better overall and load times for those applications will bemuch faster

Once you your fonts installed and hopefully organized you don’t have to reload Photoshop for the new fonts to start working, they should appear in the drop down menu right away.

This tip should work on any version of Photoshop above 5.5, including Photoshop 6, 7, CS, CS2, CS3 and CS4 (I haven't tested it on CS5).

Tip on font organization: I typically organize my fonts according to styles, type face ect. You won't notice the difference from the Photoshop drop-down however if you find a new artistic font you want to use in say MS Office and you have a bunch of artistic fonts loaded into an "artistic fonts folder" then its much easier to locate that individual font. Rather than than having to dig through hundreds of fonts you know its located in with the few artistic fonts in one single main folder.

Adobe Wowing Users With CS5 Preview Videos

Adobe this week released a new video showing users a sneak peak of some of the tools that will be available in Photoshop CS5 when i'ts launched in April. Beware after viewing this video you may feel the urge to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on the new software!!

This video is for the new 'Content-Aware Fill Tool'. This new tool allows you to remove unwanted items, like camera lens flare or stray objects, even big things like trees with a few clicks. Adding, moving and repairing items within your pictures just got a whole lot easier – all you have to do is select the problem area with the Content-Aware Fill Tool, click and Photoshop does the rest.

Honestly all I can say is WOW!! I'm ready to give it a test drive.

Adobe Launches Free Photoshop Express

Adobe announced on Today the launch of the long-awaited Web component to its digital imaging line, Photoshop. Debuting today in public beta, Adobe Photoshop Express is a free online photo sharing, editing, and storage site.

Along with with an easy-to-use, one-click editing tools like cropping, red eye correction, sharpening, touchup and more, including a set of advanced effects for changing colors, distorting images and converting photos to black and white, users will be provided with 2GB of free storage and integration with popular Web apps like Facebook, Photobucket and eventually Flickr

"Photoshop is trusted technology that has changed the visual landscape of our world. Now, Photoshop Express allows anyone who snaps a digital photo to easily achieve the high-impact results for which Adobe is known," the company's vice president of Consumer and Hosted, Doug Mack said. "Photoshop Express is a convenient, single destination where you can store, edit and share photos whether you're at home, school or on the road."