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Learn Lightroom 3 from Photographer Chris Orwig

Published by Jim Heid | Wednesday, November 18th, 2009

lightroom

The computer industry is usually a secretive place. Companies keep their product plans to themselves, and all product discussions take place under the Cone of Silence from TV’s Get Smart.

That’s one reason why Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3 is a breath of fresh air. Adobe has made a prerelease version of its popular photo-management and photo-enhancement software available for free downloading. Curious to see what’s new? Grab the beta preview and try it.

But how do you learn it? By diving into Photoshop Lightroom 3 Beta Preview, a new lynda.com course from Chris Orwig, photographer and instructor at the Brooks Institute. It’s more than two hours of detailed instruction on all the new features in Lightroom 3’s beta version, and it includes comparisons that illustrate what has changed from Lightroom 2.

Chris will also be doing courses on the final version of Lightroom 3 next year. But why wait? Download the free public beta and dive into the next version of Lightroom right now.

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Jen Kramer, CMS content, and fake hamburgers

Published by Megan O. Read | Monday, November 9th, 2009

Jen Kramer is awesome. She is the queen of Joomla!, her first book is rapidly approaching completion, she plays a mean flute, and she’s in town recording a couple of really cool CMS courses for lynda.com (CMS Website Strategy and Planning, and Preparing CMS Web Graphics and Layouts Using Open Source). Hooray for more Jen Kramer content! We took her to lunch at a local vegan/raw restaurant on Friday, because we wanted to give her the “Southern California Experience”—and because we think it’s yummy. Looking forward to your next visit out here, Jen!

Jen

Jen and her organic and vegan "hamburger," lynda.com Producer Samara Iodice, Author Relations Manager Megan, and the fantastic Jen Kramer at a Mary's Secret Garden in Ventura, CA.

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Posted in Behind the scenes, Trainers, Upcoming titles | 3 Comments »

Meet the InDesigner: Michael Murphy brings his expertise to lynda.com

Published by Megan O. Read | Friday, October 16th, 2009
MichaelMurphy

Author Michael Murphy with his new baby. From Michael's podcast, The InDesigner, episode 52, available through iTunes.

We are SO pleased to welcome Michael Murphy to our lynda.com recording booths this week!

Michael has been a designer and art director for over 20 years, maintains The InDesigner blog, and is the man behind The InDesigner videocast available on iTunes (voted one of .net magazine’s Top 40 Tech Podcasts). He’s also an Adobe Certified Expert in InDesign, an author and a frequent speaker and instructor. Between all that, and recently welcoming his first baby into the world, we managed to get some of his time for a new InDesign GREP course that we think just might change the way you look at InDesign.

Michael is just wrapping up the GREP course, so it should be ready for your hot little hands in a few months time. In the meantime, check out Michael’s fantastic videocast for really great content, in a really enjoyable format. Thanks, Michael!

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Posted in Behind the scenes, Upcoming titles | 6 Comments »

Lights, camera, live action: Dane Howard on the set of his new lynda.com course

Published by Megan O. Read | Friday, September 4th, 2009
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A panoramic view of the live-action set.

Dane Howard has been keeping our live-action set hopping this week while he records a new training course stressing the important techniques (angles, lighting, and so on) of product photography for eCommerce.

These days everyone seems to buy and sell on ebay, make hand-made goodies for Etsy, or are just using their own personal websites and blogs to share images of things they have cooked/made/found/purchased. This new course from Dane will not only inspire, it will teach how to improve the quality and visual appeal of product shots. Our live-action set is filled with adorable crafts and goodies that Dane has been shooting this week, and we can’t WAIT for you to see the final training course as he brings these items to life!

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Dane sneaks a picture of himself on the monitor.

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Posted in Behind the scenes, Trainers, Upcoming titles | 1 Comment »

Meet three fantastic authors, straight from the recording booths at lynda.com

Published by Megan O. Read | Friday, August 28th, 2009
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Clockwise starting at top: Jeff Sengstack, Simon Allardice, Curt Frye.

Straight from the recording booths this week, we have three FANTASTIC authors who may be familiar faces…

Jeff Sengstack, author of Premiere Elements 7 Essential Training, is back in the booth to bring us a few new and interesting courses that we will share with you soon!

Simon Allardice, all the way from Scottsdale (by way of Scotland), is in recording the highly anticipated iPhone SDK Essential Training. Simon is one of our original instructors from the Ojai classroom days, and recorded the UltraDev 4 course for us way back in 2002. We are thrilled he is finally able to make time in his busy schedule to get back in our booth!

Finally, Curt Frye, who released his first lynda.com course (Excel 2007: Financial Analysis) with us just this week (congrats Curt!), is in town recording two more greatly needed Excel courses: Excel 2007: Pivot Tables for Data Analysis and Excel 2008 for Mac: Pivot Tables for Data Analysis.

Thanks for coming back for more, guys! We look forward to seeing you in the booth again next time!

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Joomla! news: 1.6 alpha and beyond…

Published by Jen Kramer McKibben | Friday, June 12th, 2009
Jen Kramer McKibben

Jen Kramer McKibben

Good news, Joomla! true believers—Joomla! 1.6 will be released in its alpha version no later than June 22, 2009, according to Rob Schley, one of the core developers on the project. I enjoyed hearing Rob speak at Joomla! Day New England, held on May 30, 2009, in Brattleboro, Vermont.

Like me, your immediate thought is whether you should download it and start learning the newest version of Joomla!. As an alpha version, it’s likely to be full of bugs and landmines. You should definitely not consider using the alpha version to develop a real site for a client. The alpha is expected to be followed shortly by a beta and some release candidates, with the release version due out at the end of 2009.

Normally one might expect that as Joomla! 1.6 is released, Joomla! 1.5 support will become limited. (For example, Joomla! 1.0 support ends on July 22, 2009, and extension support for Joomla! 1.0 has been decreasing for some time.) However, this is not going to be the case.

Joomla! 1.5 will remain the “stable”, production environment for Joomla!. The 1.6 branch will be seen as quick-moving and somewhat experimental, as the core development team adds new, badly needed functionalities (better permissions system, multiple categories, and tags among them). As those technologies mature in the 1.6 branch, they might port some of the functionality back to 1.5.

Looking far into the future, Joomla! 1.7 will also be part of the faster moving track of Joomla!, while Joomla! 1.8 may become a new stable version to replace Joomla! 1.5. Both tracks will converge with Joomla! 2.0. (I don’t have dates for any of these releases.)

The plan is to support Joomla! 1.5 for at least three years, Jan 2008-Jan 2011. Of course, the further out we get in time, the less defined anything is and the more subject it is to change.

lynda.com is keeping up with the fast-moving world of Joomla!, so watch this space for more movies coming to a computer screen near you!

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Posted in Behind the scenes, Trainers, Upcoming titles | 4 Comments »

Making data dance: A peek into the new Drupal course

Published by Tom Geller | Thursday, May 28th, 2009

Tom GellerTom Geller here, author of lynda.com’s Drupal Essential Training, which I posted about in my blog. The success of that course suggested that we bring out another—but on what subject? We decided to try a new direction, and the result is Drupal 6: Online Presentation of Data.

“Presentation of data… isn’t that what Drupal does already?” some might ask. “Doesn’t that describe every Web site?”

Well… yes and no. Every page, blog post and comment is, technically speaking, data. But beyond such narrative text is a world of other applications that enliven both business and personal Web sites—and that Drupal does exceptionally well. Consider collections of data such as membership lists, photo galleries, catalogs, and maps.

Each of these applications is a collection of entries (called “nodes” in Drupalese): people, images, products, and locations, respectively. Each node contains multiple fields: For example, a point on a map might contain not only its latitude and longitude, but also its street address, name, image, and description of why it’s important.

In Drupal 6: Online Presentation of Data, I’ll be showing how to assemble these “atomic” pieces of data into useful, engaging, and attractive forms. Mostly this was done through two add-on modules for Drupal, called Content Construction Kit (CCK) and Views. But I also get a chance to show off how to plan such applications from the beginning, and some advanced techniques for creating calendars and charts.

As with Drupal Essential Training, it was a blast to work with lynda.com producer Kirk Werner and everybody at the lynda.com office. I look forward to its release later this summer, and to creating the next one!

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John Derry at lynda.com to record Painter 11

Published by Lynda | Sunday, May 24th, 2009

 

Painter table of contents on the white board!

Painter table of contents on the white board!

John Derry was here this week recording Corel Painter 11 Essential Training, due in the library in a few months. The white board scribbles lend a hint of what to expect from his new course!

 John Derry is a pioneer in the field of digital painting and was one of the original creators of Corel® Painter™, long before Corel owned the product. Since 1985, he has leveraged his background in drawing and painting to advance the look and experience of traditional art-making tools on the computer. John received a master’s degree in painting from Cranbrook Academy of Art, and co-patented two inventions relating to expressive digital mark-making. John is a regular contributor to AfterCapture Magazine, Rangefinder’s publication focusing on photographic post-production work. He teaches expressive photographic interpretation workshops in the U.S. and abroad. John is Corel’s Painter Ambassador-at-Large, and is a practicing artist and photographer. John can be found online at www.pixlart.com.

 There is no one who knows Painter better than John, and we’re very proud to include his training in our library! 

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Jay Nelson recording QuarkXpress 8

Published by Lynda | Saturday, May 23rd, 2009
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Jay Nelson spotted in the lynda.com recording booth, recording a new QuarkXpress 8 Essentials course!

Had a few chances to visit with Jay while he was out here recording, having traveled from Boulder, CO to overcast Ventura, CA. Jay is celebrating the 17th year and 201st edition of Design Tools Monthly, his newsletter about all things graphics.

Jay continues to use and recommend QuarkXPress as his favorite page layout tool. He’s especially excited to share some of the newest features, such as new intuitive ways to lay out pictures boxes by dragging, twisting and rotating, the sleek and fun new interface, the new fluidity of the pen tool, and item styles, where an item can be saved as a style and replicated easily throughout a design. He’ll also be showing how to create Flash (!) and web sites using Quark. The project is super ambitious, taking two full weeks to record, and covering more in one video course than what’s available elsewhere in any format!

Catch Jay at his How Design Conference session, or speaking at the Institute of Newspaper Technology conference. We’re proud to have Jay in the library – thanks, Jay!

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Dr. Taz Tally at lynda.com

Published by Lynda | Friday, May 15th, 2009

Taz Tally in the lynda.com recording space

Taz Tally in the lynda.com recording space as he waits for his movies to render!

My first memory of Taz is from the late 1990’s when I observed his blurry figure running up and down a giant escalator as fast as he could in the lobby of a hotel where a photography trade show was taking place.  Years later, when he first came to record video classes at lynda.com in 2004, we invited him to our house for dinner. Bruce and I will never forget Taz showing up, covered in mud from a local hike he took after work, with a live caterpillar poking out of his curly hair! These two examples describe some of the many sides of Taz Tally. He’s a digital photography master, a fitness fanatic,  sports a Ph.D. in geology, and  is a true mountain man who loves to hike and explore the wild.

Taz is currently recording a photography color correction course using Photoshop CS4. He pitched the idea to me of creating a fitness video sharing all the techniques he uses when traveling, working at his desk, or how to take advantage of every day situations and objects instead of gyms and cumbersome equipment. What do you think? Are we ready for fitness videos at lynda.com?

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Posted in Behind the scenes, Letters from Lynda, Trainers, Upcoming titles | 7 Comments »

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