One-on-One

Some of you have been asking when my Photoshop CS5 One-on-One: Advanced series is coming out. And I was all prepared to tell you this Friday. But lynda.com, being the incredible juggernaut of a video publisher that they are, began releasing it today. Chapters 13 thru 18 are up this very second. That's more than 100 movies, so it should keep you occupied for now. (If not, I totally suck.) The remaining Chapters 19 thru 24 will be up in 10 days.

Here's a live-action frame from the series. My director told me that, in retrospect, my spendy Elie Tahari shirt "looked a little disco." Let me assure you that this is one of the best shirts I've ever owned. It's a matte forest green with some excellent under-collar and inner-sleeve highlights. In the video, I don't look disco, I look positively wet. Meaning that I glisten. Like someone is misting me. Which is not necessarily what you want in a training video. But it's what you get.

That said, who gives a tinker's gumph what I look like? Read more » 

Tonight I finished recording the 228th screen-capture for my comprehensive course, "Photoshop CS5 One-on-One: Advanced," the second installment in my cradle-to-grave Photoshop CS5 video series for the vast and unparalleled lynda.com Online Training Library. I'm told I submitted more than 34 hours, unedited. For the record, that brings the total number of my Photoshop CS5 movies to 436. And I still have the Mastery course to go (plus perhaps a little something more).

If that seems gratuitous, bear in mind a couple of things: First, Photoshop is a gargantuan program, one that requires a certain amount of attention to fully understand. Second, as much as it might sometimes seem to the contrary, I take no pleasure in exploring topics that you won't find useful. I have constrained myself to 436 videos because I decided to kill a few hundred others that, on balance, seemed a tad bit overindulgent. Besides, the surviving videos are an entertaining and educational lot, so really, who the hell's counting?

Oh, and one more: When I pimped my Fundamentals course a month or two back, I mentioned that it includes more than 90% new content. Which remains true. But this time around, it's 100% new. Which, by my reckoning, means the Advanced course is all new. (The first time I did the math, I divided 100 by 100 and got 1. Obviously, I have a bad calculator.) Every stinkin' lickin' bit of it. Above you see an image from the course. One that almost killed me. And yet, I live and there's more to tell. Read more » 

A few of you may have noticed that I've been inexplicably missing the last few days. In part, that's because my sensational team and I have been working late into the night getting Adobe Photoshop CS5 One-on-One (the book) to press. It boasts a revamped outline, gobs of new sample files and exercises, and just shy of 5 hours of video (4 hours and 50 minutes to be exact). Colleen, my industrious editor on these projects, will provide more details on Monday.

Meanwhile, when not working on the book, I've been altogether preoccupied with my personal life. Specifically---and very much in keeping with Father's Day---the one involving my powerful sons, Max and Sam. Saturday, for example, the two engaged in a swim meet. (Swimming was the only sport I lettered in, so the apples remain close to the tree.) My contribution was to cheer them on and draw Marks Of The Warriors on their backs, as pictured below. That's Max on the left and Sam on the right.

CGI: 0. Sharpie and freehand fumbling: 100. Read more » 

Not to tread on Colleen's Martini Hour post---honest, you gotta check it out: it's our first Digital Member Be-In show, another crazy-but-brilliant Colleen concoction---but I just had to take a moment and share with you what I'm up to these days.

Photoshop CS5 One-on-One: Fundamentals is burning up the charts at the lynda.com Online Training Library. And my revamped Adobe Photoshop CS5 One-on-One book (with exhaustive all-new videos) is nearing completion. So I thought I'd let you know, I'm close to wrapping up my follow-up video series, Photoshop CS5 One-on-One: Advanced, a file from which appears below.

Please remember, this is no afterthought course full of additional stuff in the unlikely event that you want to be acquainted with everything in Photoshop. This is hard-core, must-know, essential info, packaged in an independent course purely for the sake of expediency. Remember how they made J. R. R. Tolkien divide Lord of the Rings into three parts? Which is insane, because if you didn't read the whole series, how would you know what happened to Fodo and Gollum and Samwise? It's like that, except that no one made me do it. I volunteered the idea and everyone said, "Yeah, whatever. Keep recording, man!" Simply put, it's the sequel. Read more »