With the continuing popularity of Adobe’s Creative Cloud Photography Plan where anybody can get both Photoshop CC and Lightroom CC for just 10 bucks a month, we’ve had some readers asking us the best ways to learn these two top imaging tools…

We always mention about the free video tutorials on Adobe TV, as well as the super­lative, compre­hensive courses offered on Lynda.com – but we can also recom­mend two new terrifi­cally helpful ebooks that you can work through step-by-step at your own pace. And fortu­nately, both books are completely free.

The first is the Adobe CC/CS6 Design Basics book that we’ve featured before on this site, which is 200+ pages taking you through the core essentials of Photoshop CC, Illustrator CC, and InDesign CC.

The second book is Victoria Bampton’s excellent Lightroom Quick Start Guide, just out in a new 79-page edition which tells you every­thing you need to know to get going with Lightroom from the ground up.

Read more…

[UPDATE (April 2017) – These still work to download the older Captivate 9 trials. We also now have the all-new Captivate 2017 Direct Download Links!]

Adobe just announced the launch and immediate availability of Captivate 9, a major desktop upgrade to the industry-leading eLearning and mLearning authoring software. In addition, the company is introducing a brand new LMS (Learning Management System) called Captivate Prime, which runs in the cloud and integrates directly with Captivate 9 and other authoring programs. Finally, there’s a free new mobile app you can use to create e-learning storyboards on-the-go entitled Captivate Draft, currently available for iPad.

Read more…

The 2015 edition of the Creative Cloud is the most powerful and versatile toolset Adobe has ever produced and we’re seeing a lot of demand for good training resources to learn how to best use this fast-growing product…

A while back, we posted details on over 1,000 pages of free ebooks for CS6.  But if you’re just getting started with the core CC 2015 design tools, what’s better than a step-by-step book that will teach you the essentials of Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign from the ground up?

Fortunately there’s a very helpful new book you can download that will teach you all of this for free, courtesy of author Professor Thomas Payne… The way the book does this is by intro­ducing and explain­ing the tools in a logical way that builds upon what is previ­ously learned. These applica­tions present a vast array of buttons and gadgets that can be over­whelming to the new user. This book makes sense of it all, not showing how every­thing works, but instead giving a found­ation and a path to learn about all those controls and what they can do for you.

Read more…