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This course is the first in a four-part series by industry-pro Deke McClelland on creating elegant, optimized graphics with the tools in Adobe Illustrator CS6 and Deke's special, branded techniques. This installment covers subjects such as working with shapes and closed paths, including painting, grouping, and coloring, and placing and adjusting type. Deke shows you how to select fonts, create hanging indents, and tweak the kerning and leading of your text. Additional chapters cover drawing and editing paths (and their points) and moving and transforming objects in your artwork.

Filters are a part of Adobe Photoshop often misused or overlooked by designers. Author Nigel French teaches a creative approach to filters, explaining how to combine them both with other filters and with the Photoshop masking and blending tools for maximum visual impact. Plus, learn how to use filter blending modes, filter masks, and how to stack filters to create unique filter combinations.

In this course, industry pro Deke McClelland teaches you how to build on your basic knowledge and achieve next-level effects in the premiere image-editing program from Adobe, Photoshop CS6. Discover how to seamlessly move and patch areas of a photo with the Content-Aware toolset; stretch the brightness of a scene with automatic and custom Levels adjustments; create intricate designs with text and shapes; and morph an image with layer effects and transformations. Deke also shares his techniques for sharpening details, whether addressing noise and highlight/shadow clipping or camera shake, and converting a full-color image to black-and-white. The final chapters show you how to best print and save images for the web, making sure all your hard work pays off in the final output.

Join author and industry expert Deke McClelland as he teaches you how to take advantage of the next level of dynamic features in Adobe Illustrator CS6. This installment of his Illustrator CS6 One-on-One series starts by showing you how to effectively manage layers, clipping groups, and swatches, so that you can easily swap out colors and content. Deke then explains how to create customized strokes and patterns and build complex gradients with transparency and dynamic effects, and then apply these features to paths, groups, and editable text to create professional-quality artwork. He also highlights some of the most popular features in Illustrator: Live Paint and all ten of its Pathfinder operations. The final chapters show how to prepare your projects for print and save them for distribution on the web.

This course provides extensive guidance on cleaning up blemishes and distractions in photos using Adobe Photoshop CC. It begins with a basic overview of the key concepts and a review of the relevant tools available in Photoshop, then covers basic and advanced cleanup techniques. Gain confidence in your ability to remove even the most challenging blemishes in your photos.

Enhance productivity by automating routine tasks and providing custom functionality not built into Access with a few basics in VBA code. Author Curt Frye introduces object-oriented programming and provides database designers with a foundation in the Access object model and the Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) programming language. The course covers automating tasks with macros, working in the Visual Basic Editor, writing functions, adding logic, reading data, controlling forms, and more.

In this installment of the Photoshop Lightroom 4 Essentials series, author and teacher Chris Orwig guides photographers through the process of improving images with creative color, sharpening, and other effects in the Lightroom Develop module. The course covers each of the tools and features in the Develop module, and shows how to perform basic adjustments, such as exposure enhancement; how to improve image quality through noise reduction and clarity adjustments; how to apply creative effects, such as split toning and vignettes; and how to perform advanced tasks, such as correcting for lens distortion. Exercise files are included with the course.

This course pulls together the skills you’ve been learning in the previous After Effects Apprentice installments to create a real-world video promo. Trish leads you through building the artwork and components used in the final piece, and then Chris shows how to assemble these precompositions into a 3D world, timed to music. Along the way, Trish and Chris also share their thoughts as they design a video project, including unifying the overall look and handling change requests from clients.

Switching from Windows to the Mac focuses on the similarities and differences between the two operating systems, highlighting the new terminology and interface that can initially be mystifying for first-time Mac owners. Author David Rivers explores not only the software—Mac OS X Lion and its bundled applications—but also important hardware subjects, like understanding keyboard and mouse differences, interacting with gestures, and connecting to printers and cameras. The course also covers transferring files and mail from a Windows computer to a Mac, and installing and working with applications. Along the way, David shares a few of his favorite free apps and tips for adjusting the system preferences, so you can get the most out of your Mac experience.