New and Not so New Tools in Photoshop

With new tools coming to Photoshop we thought it would be a good idea to give a heads up as to what they might. We also thought it might be an idea to include some of the not so new as well. Not the newest but certainly one of the most popular features on the Photoshop Courses is the Content Aware Fill tool which has been greatly updated in the latest versions. 

Then there is the New Object Selection Tool coming to Photoshop in the very near future. But this is going to be quite a fluid post so as and when new tools appear we’ll add them to this post but in the meantime take a quick look at these Youtube videos to get an idea of what goes on in the software.

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InDesign Courses in Nottingham

During the Autumn there are a number of InDesign Courses in Nottingham being run by Vantage Training in conjunction with Greta Powell. These are being run as a series of workshops and there are currently a few spaces available. The training is being hosted at Vantage’s Nottingham based offices with Greta doing the training over three days. The workshops are being run at three levels from introduction through to advanced. If you’re not sure which InDesign Workshop would be best for you please don’t hesitate to get in touch with Dawn at Vantage who will be pleased to help you. Vantage Training’s contact details are further down the post.

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InDesign Interactive Documents

These Adobe InDesign Training Courses are designed to give you the skills needed to do exactly what you need to do effectively and quickly. Because these are delivered in-house as onsite Adobe Courses the choice is huge and totally down to you and what you need to do.  Most people are aware that you can create and design spreads and layouts in InDesign but what else can you do with the software.

Once the spread has been created for print or elsewhere you can then add elements from the InDesign Interactive Panel to create eBooks, presentations, slideshows and other online media. You can also use InDesign’s Interactive Panel to design and publish online forms to collect data and other information from perspective clients.

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Bespoke Digital Design Training Courses

Many of our Adobe Training Courses are run as Bespoke Digital Design Training Courses where content is mixed and matched from existing course overviews or specific criteria is given by the client themselves. This criteria tends to be as broad as it is long but it is always firmly centred around the client requirement. These design training courses have been organised for virtually every area in both public and private sector from designers, content creators, tender writers, the print industry, publishing, finance, construction and through to education, HR & Adminsitration.

If you are looking for a tailored Adobe training onsite at your premises either in the Midlands or UK wide why not get in touch to for an informal chat about your training goals.

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Adding Animations in Camtasia

At Greta Powell Training we recently ran a Camtasia Training Course for the School Effectiveness in Ealing of which part of the course was spent working with transitions and animations. Shortly after one of the ladies on the course dropped us an email asking if we could show her how to animate the school logo. Post course support is one of the things that we provide as part of our training courses. This is a lifetime support for anyone who has been on one of our courses.

We do this in the form of a no frills, straight to the point video demonstrating how the process /technique /feature is done and in this particular case sent Sally her video a few hours after her email

“Hey Greta, thank you so much, how wonderful for you to have responded with a recording!

Fabulous”

Sally Davies, School Effectiveness, Ealing 

Camtasia Animations Training Video

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Vector Shapes in Illustrator

A very short post today to share a handy Illustrator tutorial link on working with Basic Vector Shapes in Illustrator on the Adobe website. It is an extremely clear and progressive tutorial that shows you how easy it is to created artwork from very basic tools

Obviously on the Introduction to Ilustrator Training course you will learn how to create, edit shapes and to work with lines and paths to build your own original artwork. Because they are ‘live shapes’ you can continually edit them with no quality loss whatsoever. However in the meanwhile why not take a look at the Adobe Tutorial.

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Photoshop Poster Design Course

Every week or so we do a small write up about one of the tailored Adobe Courses we run. Early this week saw Greta return to Newark to deliver a Photoshop Poster Design course. This was a two day Photoshop Course with a specific aim in mind – creating, designing and publishing posters. The client was Rufford Park Golf & Country Club who had been outsourcing their poster design work for some time. They felt with some training they would be able to bring the posters in-house and save the club some money.

Everyone was fairly new to Photoshop so the first day was spent mostly on covering the essential tools and features they need to know to use Photoshop. Obviously layers played a big part in the day as did the transform tool. The guys were very keen to replicate the swoosh shape at the top of their poster design so we worked a lot with Photoshop’s Transform Tool.

Photoshop Swoosh Tutorial – how we did it

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InDesign Training Course in Bristol

So this week saw a trip down to the South West to deliver an InDesign Training Course in Bristol. Most people dislike the M5 but personally I like it, it always reminds me of driving down to the South West for holidays with my son. (Enough of the personal stuff). This particular course was bespoke InDesign Training for an engineering company, a regular client of Greta Powell Training who were looking for specific InDesign skills for their bid writers.

InDesign Training Brief

Briggs & Forrester Group are a well known engineering company whose bid writers wanted to stream line and build on their current InDesign workflow. They were working from existing templates and had a good grasp of the software but felt there was more they could do using InDesign’s automated features. 

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What is Photoshop?

Photoshop has been around since the 80’s and is often described as the industry standard photo editing app. In essence what it does is create, edit and enhance photography for a multitude of purposes for both the business or home user.

What’s it used for?

The answer to that is how long is a piece of string? It can be used in photo production for editing huge amounts of photos, to lightly edit business images, create animated GIF’s, edit basic videos, design social media icons and create digital artwork similar to paintings. It truly is huge.

What is a raster & what is a vector?

In short raster refers to a photograph (pixels) whilst vector refers to a drawn piece of artwork. So for example if David Bailey had to pick one he’d opt for Photoshop whereas Vincent Van Gogh would go for Illustrator.

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Fantastic Photographer – Ian Treherne

The other day on Twitter this post popped up about a fantastic photographer, Ian Treherne. Clicking the BBC link I then read the article and was bowled over by the beauty of his images. They really are fantastic and its difficult to comprehend that Ian can barely see. Having finished the BBC article I then looked him up on Twitter, followed him then scrolled through his feed. Apparently he has a great love for ballet and created this short video. Enjoy!

Swan by Ian Treherne

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