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Thursday, May 17th, marked the completion of my next video course for lynda.com, Illustrator CS6 One-on-One: Fundamentals. It will include all sorts of exciting and monumentally educational live-action introductions (replete with graphic overlays) as well as scads of screen casts in which I demonstrate how the most elemental facets of this amazing program work. Not to mention how you work with it.

For example, in Chapter 6, "Tracing an Image" (in which I explore CS6's new Image Trace panel), I show you how to take a scanned Sharpie drawing of a half of an insect (how much more pedestrian could that be?) and turn it into the fully realized butterfly pictured below. Entirely auto-traced. And thus transformed from a murky quagmire of pixels to the resolution-independent vector-based realm of Illustrator CS6.

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As of the posting of this article, you have 24 hours left to download the free public beta of Photoshop CS6. So if you haven't installed it yet, drop everything you're doing and start downloading!

To acquaint yourself with the new features, check out my free Photoshop CS6 Beta Preview course at lynda.com.

And if you're ready for the deep dive, check out Photoshop CS6 One-on-One: Fundamentals, the first in what will be a four-course video series on every single aspect of Photoshop CS6, presented in the order you need to learn it. This and other of my courses will appear every four to six weeks on lynda.com. Read more » 

Last night I read an article that made me laugh so hard, Kool-Aid came out my nose. Which was weird because I was drinking gin.

(BTW, I have to tell you, I discovered a new one: It's called Leopold's Navy Strength, and it might be the best stuff I've ever tasted. For you to agree, you'll need to have swilled airplane fuel and survived. Assuming that's the case, add a hint of coriander and you have yourself a cocktail.) Read more » 

Tonight, at 9:01pm California time (that's 1 minute after midnight on the East Coast), Photoshop pulls off something it has attempted just once before: It enters a nearly seven-week period of public beta, during which you can download the program for free. Yes, Photoshop CS6 is available, right this moment, for your immediate click, install, and enjoyment. And it will cost you nothing.

That is to say, you won't have to shell out cash. But you will have to expend some attention. Because, and make no mistake about this, CS6 is one of the biggest upgrades to Photoshop since its inception.

Which is why I've created a total of 29 movies on the topic for lynda.com, including the one above and five more embedded in this post. The full 29-movie course is available, in its entirety, for free to members and non-members alike. Just click on this link, Photoshop CS6 Beta Preview, and start watching.

Meanwhile, here's my take on the product: After many months using the application, I put it in the same rarefied air as Photoshop 1 (a big upgrade from no Photoshop whatsoever), Photoshop 3 (layers!), Photoshop 5 (color management, layer effects, history, editable text), Photoshop 7 (healing, Camera Raw), and Photoshop CS3 (smart filters, 3D). Feature-wise, it's closest to the 1990's-era Photoshop 5. Because the damn thing's dripping with the stank of the spanking new. If this were a car, you'd be driving it for a month just to learn all the gizmos and then sitting in your garage just to smell the upholstery. And honestly, friends, this is one good-smelling application.

In fact, Photoshop CS6 may be the most impressive upgrade to the program since Adobe assigned the CS trademark. My two cents, love to know yours.

For example, there's the infectious tang of the dark interface, feature in the above movie. (Lightroom users will say they already had this, but this is Photoshop, so where's the comparison?) The darkness is calming and it allows you to focus on your image without the distraction of the bright stuff around the edges. On the PC, it looks like the image below. On the Mac, it's topped off by a light gray menu bar, which sucks, but it's a necessity of the light OS. Click the image below to see a full-res view.

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And that's just the beginning. What follows is a list of my Top 10 favorite features in the program:

My final video course of 2011 for the lynda.com Online Training Library is now live. Titled Photoshop Masking & Compositing: Hair, it lives up to its name, showing you how to mask and composite the most fragile of all photographic details, hair, in that most powerful of masking applications, Photoshop.

(Yes, I'm aware that the term "follicle" specifically refers to the root of the hair, not the part we see and therefore need to mask. It's all about the alliteration, dammit!)

My goal is to boost both your skills and your confidence. As well as pass along lots of useful, in-the-trenches techniques. All in just 3 hours and 6 minutes! Here's an illustrated outline of the four feature-rich chapters and the fun, challenging projects that accompany them: Read more »