Are short graphic design courses really able to teach you how to be a graphic designer? Absolutely not, any qualified graphic design graduate would be highly offended if you even contemplated to be on their level, there is a big difference between 2 days Photoshop/InDesign training and 3 years hard graft on a degree! However short courses do have a value... We regularly train people who either run small business or work in marketing departments. Some people already have a brand identity, some just have a simple logo. What they all have in common is they know their businesses and Bran...

If I learn the Creative Suite 5 will I have to start all over again with Creative Suite 6? Adobe know that millions of industry professionals rely on their software on a day to day basis, they know there would be uproar if there was a radical change in the basic working of Photoshop, Illustrator or InDesign. Imagine a design agency churning out hundreds of pieces of artwork every day or a newspaper hitting tight deadlines, the industries would slow right down if suddenly all the designers had to retrain to do their jobs! Ive spent a lot of time looking as CS6 and believe me there are some ...

  The Adobe Creative Suite comprises of many different pieces of software, the big three for all Designers is Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign but actually what are they all used for? The most commonly used is Photoshop, this is rastor based which means each image is made up of tiny dots or pixels, Photoshop is used purely for editing your pixel based images. Adobe Illustrator and InDesign however do have a few blurred lines between them so some people find it hard to see what the difference is and which one to use when... What is Adobe Illustrator used for? Illustrator is a vec...

Back in the 1980's page layout programs were part of a revolution called desktop publishing, designers and publishers could use programs such as PageMaker or QuarkXPress to set type and layouts right at their desks. Suddenly designers had to learn new skills, not just to lay out pages and artwork but how to do this digitally, they had to learn how to use computers, how to import text and images at the correct resolution - It was the biggest change to the industry of Graphic Design that had ever been, until now that is... InDesign - a whole new world of digital publishing... Initially InD...

Have you ever really wondered what the difference between JPEG, GIFF and PNG are? Well hopefully this will explain... GIF: Graphics Interchange Format GIF is by nature an 8-bit color file, meaning they are limited to a palette of 256 colors, which can be picked from the RGB color model and saved to a Color Look Up Table (CLUT), or simply “Color Table.” There are, however, standard color palettes, like the “Web Safe” palette. An important note is that Grayscale images are by nature an 8-bit palette, so saving them as GIF is fairly ideal. Apart from support for transparency, GIF also is su...

No idea what people are going on about when they talk about raster and vector based graphics, pixels and paths? Let me explain... Vector... Ok so lets start with Vectors, probably the hardest one to get your head around, when we talk about vectors we are talking about lines and curves, artwork made from anchor points in Illustrator or InDesign - basically it is artwork that is created from scratch in a design programme, artwork that is based on paths and curves has no resolution information, there are no pixels per inch or dots per inch it is all scaled from the path that is drawn. So whe...

The Adobe Creative Cloud - how it works and why its a benefit to everybody who wants to use industry standard creative software I have heard a lot of negative comments and anger about the Adobe Creative Cloud from users of Adobe software. I just want to explain why I think the new pricing structure will change the way all software is purchased in the future... Before the Adobe Creative Cloud came along if you wanted to buy Adobe Photoshop to edit some images you would be paying £600-£700 for an individual licence, then after 6-12 months there would be a newer version released where you wou...

Adobe InDesign is a desktop publishing application produced by Adobe Systems as part of their Creative Suite. It can be used to create posters, flyers, brochures, magazines, newspapers and books. Graphic designers are the main users, creating and laying out brochures, posters, and print media. But as the basics of the InDesign program are easy to master and the new monthly subscription purchasing plan (Adobe Creative Cloud) is making the software much more affordable - many other industries are starting to use InDesign to create a variety of material. Marketing professionals can cut their ...

This detailed video explains how to remove backgrounds in Photoshop using the Quick selection tool and your layers panel, learn how to quickly and efficiently cut out images and remove/replace the backgrounds in any image. We also use the very effective 'Refine Selection' tool to make a fast accurate selection of an image to remove the background. Once a background is removed from an image in Photoshop we can replace it with whatever we like, the key is making an accurate selection with the quick selection tool which I explain clearly how to use in this short tutorial. Mark Willia...

In this FREE photoshop tutorial I will show you how to replace colour in photoshop using the colour replacement tool, we will refine a selection and apply a new colour to a specific area of an image I will talk you through how to make an accurate selection of the area you wish to change the colour of and then we will look at the options with the colour replacement tool to change the specified colour. Mark Williams is the Director of Creative Studios Derby LTD, the East Midlands largest and most experienced Adobe training centre. If you need help learning any software from the Adobe C...