[UPDATE – Also see our all-new Creative Cloud 2021 Giveaway!]

MAX 2016 – the big annual conference intersecting creativity and Adobe technology – is coming up this fall in San Diego, California… And continuing our long tradition of free Adobe giveaways, we’ve got one free regular full conference pass (worth US$1,595) to give away, plus one US$400-off ticket savings, both courtesy of our friends at Adobe Systems!

Adobe MAX 2016, The Creativity Conference – running from November 2-4 – will be chock full of expert keynotes and presentations, technical and how-to ses­sions, product announce­ments and sneak peeks, evening events and parties, networking and meeting the teams, and possibly some surprises… The show is an amazing experi­ence where they really take care of you from start to finish while you soak up all the growth and learning you can.

In fact, many of the best courses and tutorial sessions from the last MAX were recorded and are still available on-demand for free viewing, covering all Adobe applications.

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[UPDATE – Also see our all-new Creative Cloud 2021 Giveaway!]

Last June, Adobe shipped the new CC 2015 set of tools and services – a milestone marking the third major release of the CC product line, which replaced CS6 from 2012. This latest CC version contains thousands of new features and advancements compared to CS6 (across all creative applica­tions), and it is available only via Creative Cloud membership – a community which now surpasses 22 million paid members.

CC 2015 is also known as the Creative Cloud 2015 Release… Since its initial launch, Adobe has issued many updates to further upgrade the functionality and capabilities of the different tools – and all ongoing upgrades are auto­matic­ally included at no addi­tional charge. Sometime this year, the company is expected to ship the next major milestone release of the product line (e.g., CC 2015.5 or CC 2016), and this will also be included for current members.

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Here’s an incredible new resource that you should not miss – and even bookmark/share… It’s a compre­hensive professional training course on how to best use Adobe Photoshop from O’Reilly’s InfiniteSkills – normally costing US$130, but now completely FREE with no catch. It includes 13 hours of high-quality instruction broken out into 23 chapters with 166 video tutorials (in HD or SD), covering all major aspects of Photoshop – the world’s most popular graphics and photo editing software – at no cost!

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[UPDATE (May 2016) – Adobe just reduced the length of all CC free trials from 30 to 7 days… So the approach below will still work, but would triple the period from 7 to 21 days.]

How long are the free trials for Adobe software? Most people would say 30 days – but practically speak­ing, it’s actually almost 50% longer, at 44 days.  Here’s why, and how you can do it…

After downloading and installing Adobe’s free trial software – whether it’s the latest major release CC 2015 (have you tried it yet?), CS6, Acrobat, Captivate, or Lightroom – your official free trial will begin for 30 calendar days from the date you first run the application (like Photoshop) on your computer.

Once you reach the end of that month – if you haven’t already purchased the product – then that free trial period will end and all the files you created will still be yours, but the software itself will no longer start on your system. And redownloading or reinstalling it won’t give you a new free trial.

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[UPDATE – Also see our all-new Creative Cloud 2021 Giveaway!]

In June, Adobe shipped the all-new CC 2015 set of tools and services – a milestone marking the third major release of the CC product line, which replaced CS6 from 2012. This latest CC version contains thousands of new features and advancements compared to CS6 (across all creative applica­tions), and it is available only via Creative Cloud membership – a community which now surpasses 22 million paid members.

Adobe CC 2015 is also known as the Creative Cloud 2015 Release… And that is exactly what we’re giving away for free below, and this offer is open to everyone world­wide.

In all, Creative Cloud 2015 comes with 15 new desk­top applica­tions (Photo­shop CC 2015, Illus­trator CC 2015, InDesign CC 2015, Light­room CC 2015, Muse CC 2015, and all your other favorites), together with other comple­mentary tools and services (such as Acrobat Pro, Edge, Typekit, Behance ProSite, CC Market) and much more. See the entire contents of what’s in Creative Cloud, where all ongoing upgrades are auto­matic­ally included at no addi­tional charge.

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[UPDATE (Oct. 2020) – Watch over 350 new courses & tutorials from MAX 2020 – free!]

Did you make it to MAX this year? Adobe’s Creativity Conference broke all records with 7,000 attendees coming together in Los Angeles earlier this month, up from 5,000 just a couple years ago… And that was despite an increase in the cost of a full conference pass to US$1,595.

For the price of that ticket, participants enjoyed major new product launches, inspirational key­notes from creative luminaries, hundreds of enriching training sessions, plentiful opportunities for networking with colleagues, access to the latest cool technology on the pavilion floor, meeting the Adobe product teams in person, the highly-anticipated “Sneak Peek” demos of jaw-dropping new features under development, and of course the famous MAX Bash party. And this year, all attendees also received a free year of Adobe Stock as well as a new FUJIFILM X-T10 camera.

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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.

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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…

The crowd erupts at Adobe MAX 2014 when Microsoft gives every attendee a new Surface Pro 3.

[UPDATE – Also see our all-new Creative Cloud 2021 Giveaway!]

MAX 2015 – the big annual conference intersecting creativity and Adobe technology – is coming up this fall in Los Angeles, California… And continuing our long tradition of free Adobe giveaways, we’ve got one free regular full conference pass (worth US$1,595) to give away, plus one US$400-off ticket savings, both courtesy of our friends at Adobe Systems!

Read more…

[UPDATE – Also see our all-new Creative Cloud 2021 Giveaway!]

Last June, Adobe shipped the new CC 2014 product line, a major milestone of creative tools and services that upgrades last year’s CC 2013 version, which itself replaced CS6 from 2012.  This latest CC 2014 release contains over 1,000 new features and innovations compared to CS6 (across all apps), and it is available only via Creative Cloud membership.

As both CC 2014 and CC 2013 came out in mid-June, we expect the annual major release cycle to soon begin anew with the imminent launch of CC 2015… And that is exactly what we’re giving away for free below, and this offer is open to everyone world­wide.

Update: Now confirmed! The official shipping date for CC 2015 will be on June 16th.

In all, Creative Cloud 2015 will come with over a dozen new desk­top applica­tions (Photoshop CC 2015, Illus­trator CC 2015, InDesign CC 2015, Muse CC 2015, and all your favorites), together with other comple­mentary tools and services (such as Behance ProSite, Typekit, Creative Cloud Market) and more… In fact, the all-new Light­room CC 2015 plus Acrobat DC Pro are already out today and available for download. See the entire contents of what’s in Creative Cloud, where all ongoing upgrades are auto­matic­ally included at no addi­tional cost.

Read more…