With over 15 million paid members for Creative Cloud and growing, we often get this question from readers: “What’s a good book to get started with the most popular Adobe tools?” While there are a lot of great CC books for sale on Amazon, why not begin with an excellent title that’s available to everyone for free, and that you can download instantly?

Over the years, we’ve compiled a collection of over 30 free books that you can download and use for learning all of Adobe’s different creative tools… But there’s one volume that always stands out as a favorite – and even better, it has just been republished in a brand new expanded edition for the CC 2019 tools.

So if you’re just getting going with (or would like a solid primer covering) the core Creative Cloud design tools, then what better than a step-by-step guide that will teach you the essentials of Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Adobe XD, and Muse from the ground up?

So here it is: the very helpful “Adobe CC Design Basics” that will give you all of this for free, courtesy of author Professor Thomas Payne… The book works 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.

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Longtime readers know that we offer a series of free books for Adobe software with over 30 different titles that anyone can download on how to best use the different major products… These books have been extremely popular and well-received.

But since Adobe software is all about creating, for a long time there was a missing part: a collection of free books simply about building your creativity – something that everyone in the world can use and benefit from… So here is that set! You can legally download and use the five PDF e-books below to inspire your own creative process and help improve your work, no matter what you do in life. They are (in our view) all easy, enjoyable, and enriching reads.

Book #1: The Creative Aid Handbook (142 Pages)

Co-creators Richard Tapp and Nicole Smith of Kooroo Kooroo rightly describe The Creative Aid Handbook as a outside-of-the-box resource to get your creative juices flowing: “We wrote, designed, and illustrated a book featuring unusual tips to nurture your creative well-being, boost your creative intellect and foster internal inspiration. Meant to serve as a mini-resource for your creative projects and food for your creative thoughts. Read more…

Here’s the brand new edition of a very handy resource from James Wamser – a complete reference to all versions and features of Adobe Photoshop from CS1 to CC 2019… Similar to his InDesign handbook, it’s called the Adobe Photoshop New Features Guide: From CS to CC – and this 97-page ebook is available for free download now:

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Last month, Adobe shipped the all-new CC 2019 set of tools and services – a milestone marking the seventh 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 15 million paid subscribers.

Adobe CC 2019 is also known as the Creative Cloud 2019 Release… And that is exactly what we’re giving away for free below, and this offer is open to everyone world­wide.

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Adobe Acrobat DC 2019 is now shipping! If you hadn’t heard by now, “DC” stands for Document Cloud, which is Adobe’s set of integrated online services to help customers better manage critical documents. At the heart of Document Cloud is Acrobat DC – the industry standard for creating, sharing and editing PDFs – which was completely rearchitected for the initial DC 2015 milestone release several years ago. For more information, see: What Is the Document Cloud?

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Over the years, we’ve put together a large collection of free Adobe books that we share with our readers here… This extensive set of helpful, no-cost books has now grown to over 30 different titles that you can legally download and use royalty-free, forever.

These digital books cover Creative Cloud, Creative Suite, Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Acrobat, Dreamweaver, Muse, Lightroom and more – but until now, we haven’t always had a good and recent offering for Adobe Animate CC (formerly Flash Professional).

Fortunately, this has changed with the publication of the new “Creating Multi­platform Animations with Animate CC” guidebook, which comes from award-winning Adobe Education Leader and longtime Animate guru Joseph Labrecque.

Mr. Labrecque conducted a paid Animate CC workshop at the Adobe MAX conference this month, and is now making the class’s training materials available to the general public completely free of charge. This special offer includes the main 59-page course workbook together with 9 MB of sample working assets, all of which you can download for free here.

Here is the overview description of this course:

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Did you make it to MAX this year? Adobe’s Creativity Conference once again broke records with 14,000 attendees coming together in Los Angeles last week, a full doubling from 7,000 only 3 years ago… In fact, it was the largest gathering of talented creative professionals that there has ever been in one room, anytime in history!

Those who were there enjoyed major new product launches, inspirational key­notes from creative luminaries, hundreds of enriching training sessions, countless opportunities for networking with colleagues, access to the latest cool technology on the Pavilion floor, meeting the Adobe product teams in person, and the always-mind-blowing “Sneak Peek” demos of amazing new features under development.

But if you didn’t make it, no worries – believe it or not, you can still tap into many of the best resources from the comfort of your own laptop, tablet, or phone!

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This morning, Adobe unveiled the new CC 2019 Release, which the company says is the biggest product launch since they first introduced Creative Cloud over six years ago. Pam Clark, Senior Director for Photoshop, exclaimed, “Today is by far the largest product announcement and launch experience of my career on the Photoshop team, and at Adobe. We have never delivered so much amazing new innovation to customers on the same day. I can’t wait to see what you create!”

And from what we’ve seen, it looks to be true. There are major updates across the entire suite of tools and services, including entirely new Creative Cloud tools as well as significant new features and improvements to existing applications, and even some surprises.

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The new version 2019 of Adobe’s “Elements” line is out – and since Elements now takes on the upcoming year of its release instead of a version number, this edition would be the equivalent of version 17 in the previous numbering system.

And continuing our tradition of publishing the direct download links for major Adobe products such as Creative Cloud, Lightroom 6/CC, and Acrobat DC, below you’ll find the direct links from Adobe’s servers for the free trials and full offline installers for the new releases of Photoshop Elements 2019 and Premiere Elements 2019, for both Windows and macOS.

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Having originally launched almost seven years ago, by this time you’ve heard about Adobe’s fast-growing Creative Cloud, you’ve dispelled the all-too-common myths surrounding it, and perhaps are considering subscribing to CC now that over 15 million of your colleagues already have…

You probably also know that Adobe stopped development of the older “CS” releases back in 2012, and that there have been thousands of new product features, enhancements, and perform­ance improvements added to CC since Creative Suite ended, as well as integral new services.

But did you know that no matter what you do, you can sign up right now for a zero-cost class of membership that never expires and provides free benefits for life?  Anyone can have this free level currently in 83 countries worldwide, even if you still use the older tools instead, or even if you use no other Adobe products or services at all.  No credit card is required.

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