This event is not a free event, to register at the early bird rate of $25, click here for registration –>

With all the remarkable changes to Adobe’s Creative Suite, LAdobe and the other LA area user groups have decided to present a one-day ‘mini-conference’ of sorts. This event will feature some of the finest creative minds who are willing to share their insights and knowledge in how to get the most out of CS6.

While the event is in its’ early stages, the speaker lineup is as follows:

Justin Seeley is a staff author for lynda.com and an Adobe Certified Expert. He has several years experience in both print and web design, and has authored over 60 hours of instructional content to date. Justin is the creator of the Photoshop Quicktips Podcast, a show that consistently ranks int he top 25 software how-to podcasts in the iTunes store and his techniques have been featured in several digital publications, podcasts and blogs..

Colin Smith of PhotoshopCafe.com is a best-selling author, trainer, and award-winning new-media designer who has caused a stir in the design community with his stunning photorealistic illustrations composed entirely in Photoshop. He is founder of the world’s most popular Photoshop resource site, PhotoshopCAFE.com, which boasts over three million visitors.

Rick Miller is a Senior Solutions Engineer for Education at Adobe Systems where he helps Adobe’s education customers find the solutions they need to enhance the pedagogical experiences of their students. Before working at Adobe Systems, Rick taught Photoshop/Digital Imaging at the prestigious Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, CA, and Digital Design at Cal Poly Pomona University, so he’s cognizant of the unique challenges that face educators. Rick is an Adobe Certified Expert in Photoshop, Lightroom, and Acrobat Connect. Additionally, Rick is an expert in color management. Moreover, Rick is a professional photographer who is certified on the Leaf and Phase One digital backs. Rick continues to consult with Law Enforcement agencies in the Forensic application of Photoshop.

Your admission includes coffee at breakfast, a boxed lunch assortment, drinks provided by eBoost and Coco Cafe, snacks from Pretzel Crisps and door prizes from Adobe, MacMall, Artbeats, Deposit Photos, Focal Press, O’Reilly and much more.

This is not your typical user group event. Prepare for an entire day of learning how to make the most of your new copy of Creative Suite 6 and make a few new allegiances as well. We look forward to seeing you all on June 10!

This event is not a free event, to register at the early bird rate of $25, click here for registration –>

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For this event, we’re pleased to be bringing back one of our best speakers, Stephen Burns, the president of the San Diego Photoshop Users Group and most recent instructor to the Light Photo Workshops. He has written the books, Photoshop CS5 Trickery & FX, The Art Of Poser 8 Pro & Photoshop CS5, The Art Of Poser & Photoshop, Author of Advanced Photoshop CS4 Trickery & FX, Author of “Advanced Photoshop CS3 Trickery & FX, Author of “Advanced Photoshop CS2 Trickery & FX and also Photoshop CS Trickery & FX for Charles River Media.

With Adobe presenting some wonderful upgrades in a variety of areas in Photoshop CS6. Stephen Burns will share how to be artists with these new tools by creating an artistic scene before your eyes.

One of our goals as artists is to use our chosen medium to express how the world around us has influenced us and how we can share our thoughts and feelings as to what we are experiencing.  To do this we must understand medium and this also applies to the digital tools.  Stephen will share how each of the tools and features work and how to create intuitively and uniquely with these new improvements.

Come and enjoy as you see Stephen share what is possible in Photoshop CS6.

In addition to this special talk, we’ll also have the finals of this year’s edition of Photoshop Idol featuring our three finalists showcasing their ‘Vote for MAX’ poster designs. The winner will receive a copy of Creative Suite 6, a series of eBooks from O’Reilly, a training certificate from Webucator and much, much more. Entries for Photoshop Idol will continue to be accepted up until midnight, May 15. So email you entries to LAdobe as soon as you can or you’ll miss out on your opportunity!

Well have refreshments courtesy of eBoost and Coco Cafe. This will be a fantastic evening and one of your first peeks at Creative Suite 6. We look forward to seeing you on May 24th.

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For this event, we’re expecting the big announcement of Adobe’s Creative Suite 6 and if that does happen, we will be providing you this evening with one of the first peeks in LA of the new software. You may have seen the sneaks at MAX, downloaded the public beta of Photoshop CS6, but now you’re about to look at everything! We can’t show it all to you in a couple of hours, but we will hit on what we at LAdobe believe to be the most exciting developments.

Even if CS6 isn’t announced just in time for our meeting on the 26th, no worries. We will be providing a in-depth look at Photoshop CS6′s public beta. You’ll see all sorts of new features like the advanced 3D, the content-aware tools, the new cropping and the vector layers among all sorts of amazing new tools in your virtual sandbox. No doubt, Photoshop CS6 will change the way you design. Now find out why on April 26.

Well have refreshments courtesy of ING Direct, eBoost and Coco Cafe as well as offering prizes from our various sponsors and another prize pack from NewEgg. This will be a fantastic evening and one of your first peeks at Creative Suite 6. We look forward to seeing you on April 26th.

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PLEASE RSVP FOR THE BLACKBERRY/PHONEGAP EVENT HERE –>

For this event, we are teaming up with the new LA Mobile PhoneGap Developers Group for a special evening with Blackberry as they present an evening of new technologies in the web world. We’ll be looking at Blackberry’s WebWorks which helps to extend the use of HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript frameworks for integration into the PhoneGap framework that Adobe recently purchased.

We’ll be featuring William Vablais, who is the Technical Evangelist for RIM/BlackBerry. With 22 years of experience in the computer industry, at McDonnell Douglas, Sun Microsystems and as an 8-year veteran of Microsoft, William’s passion and serial entrepreneurial drive have tuned his evangelism and business development abilities to start and manage new companies.

Responsible for yearly $65M of technology grants to Ivy League schools while at Microsoft, he was able to provide guidance and sound business practices for dozens of projects. After 3 patents and work establishing industry technology standards relating to multimedia, his interests moved on to new endeavors.

Last 4 years working in the telecom industry, he built out businesses in virtual PBX systems. He is a passionate inventor with a focus on the realities of building and scaling businesses around new technologies and inventions.

Recently, he joined RIM as a technical evangelist where he manages RIM’s Europe, the Middle East and Africa Developer Relations Group.

Well have refreshments courtesy of ING Direct and food from California Monster Salads as well as offering prizes from our various sponsors and another prize pack from NewEgg. This will be a very special evening with Blackberry and the new LA PhoneGap group and we look forward to seeing you on the 11th.

PLEASE RSVP FOR THE BLACKBERRY/PHONEGAP EVENT HERE –>

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Adobe has placed a free, public beta version of Photoshop CS6 for download at Adobe Labs. This is a full, working, save-enabled version of Photoshop and it promises to be most exciting series of changes and addition to features in the entire history of Photoshop.

Besides those changes in appearance, Mini Bridge has also changed and is now a film strip panel to better match Lightroom and Elements.

For starters, it looks different. Once you open it, you’ll see a darker appearance. It looks more like its companion app, Lightroom as well as other programs like Premiere Pro, After Effects and the new Edge. Don’t worry if you don’t like the new look. There will be four shades available in the Preferences>User Interface area. If you want to switch it back to the shade it was in Photoshop CS5, not a problem! There’s a setting for that. And these changes were not just for window dressing. The UI was totally reworked with all new controls, 1000s of new icons, better alignment in dialogs, corrected grammar, etc.

If you decide to purchase Photoshop CS6 Extended, you’ll be treated to the fastest version of Photoshop ever. That’s thanks to Adobe’s new Mercury Graphics Engine. You’ll need an OpenCL/graphics card but if you have one, watch out! You’ll be faster than anything at Indy!

Did you like Photoshop’s Content Aware fills? Now get ready for the Content Aware patch and move tools. That’s right. Tools you already know how to use with the addition of the very popular Content Aware fill! This will help you make retouching your images a lot simpler and easier.

Wait til you check out the new Blur Gallery. This is a tool that will add blur to any image without masks, layers or depth maps. Bokeh effects, Tilt Shift, etc All built within Adobe’s Mercury Graphics Engine.

The Adaptive Wide Angle filter is an interactive, more natural way to correct distortions in your images.

If you’re an InDesign user, you’re already likely familiar with Paragraph and Character styles. Now the same feature has been introduced inside of Photoshop. It’s called Type Styles and it’ll speed the way you incorporate type into your images.

There’s been a lot of changes to the Layers panel. For starters, you can now search in your overall composition. You can search by layer type, attributes, and even layer name. Makes attempting to locate the proper layer in your document a lot faster without the headaches of traveling up and down the list.

Now adjustment layers and Masks share a properties panel. Color Range also has an option to intelligently recognize skin colors or all skin colors.

Familiar with the features of Photoshop and Video? You will be with the new Video editing and slide shows features. Now you can combine video and stills, like the pan and scan or Ken Burns effects – in your composition. This used to be only for Extended users, but now with so many DSLRs doing video – this is a standard feature in CS6. Uses same video encoding/decoding as Premiere and After Effects. Yes, you can now produce a movie inside of Photoshop!

And if you plan to own Photoshop CS6 Extended, you’ll have the amazing power of 3D like you never had before. Repousse is passe and in its place is a completely overhauled 3D system using Adobe Mercury Graphics Engine for 3D. Now you’ll have 3D controls at your fingertips. Along with this check out the new reflections and drag-able shadows for 3D, easy alignment and distribution of 3D objects and faster Adobe Ray Trace rendering. It’s an amazing series of changes and new features that will allow you to experiment with the power of 3D like never before.

So why are you reading this? Start downloading the new public beta of Photoshop CS6 for Mac or PC, participate in the Photoshop forums and let your imagination fly!

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Lightroom 4 is a major release, adding significant new capabilities and innovations. New adjustment controls maximize dynamic range from cameras, recovering exceptional shadow details and highlights. The software features new and improved auto adjustments to dynamically set values for exposure and contrast, and additional local adjustment controls including Noise Reduction, Moire and White Balance.

Lightroom 4 provides photographers the tools to create beautiful photo books with text controls and a variety of easy-to-use templates, as well as a direct link for photo book creation from within the new Book module. A new intuitive Map module displays images already assigned a location, provides location tagging and reverse geo-tagging controls and saved locations for easy assignment of a photographer’s common locations.

Now, native video support gives photographers the capability to play, trim and extract frames from video clips shot on DSLRs, point-and-shoot cameras and smartphones. Video-specific presets and many standard Lightroom image adjustment controls can be applied to video clips, and adjusted videos can be exported as a H.264 file or published directly to Facebook or Flickr*.

In the Develop module, presets fully utilize new processing technology and the addition of soft proofing helps photographers tune images in a destination color space to ensure content looks its best. In addition, customers can now email images directly from Lightroom using an email account of their choice.

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PLEASE RSVP FOR THE FLEX ROAD SHOW HERE –>

For this event, we are teaming up with the LA Flex User Group for a special evening with Adobe’s Flex Team as they are traveling across North America this month promoting the virtues of using Adobe Flex and the Flash Platform. This event will clarify any changes to Flex and Flash including updates on the runtimes and tooling. Additionally, the sessions will educate folks about the Apache process and what it takes for Flex Software Development Kit (SDK), as a project within the Apache Software Foundation, to continue to thrive. These meetings will be the best place to get accurate and up-to-date information about anything related to Flex.

Representing Adobe will be Greg Wilson from Adobe’s Flex Team. I have three passions – Technology, Photography, and Aviation Technology. =For the past 6 years Greg has been with Adobe speaking at events, blogging, building tools, helping developers and learning something new every single day. Greg also manages a team that is known as the Adobe Enterprise Platform Evangelist Team.

We will also have Jeff Tapper from Digital Primatives who is also working on the future of Flex, the Spoon Project Jeff has been developing Internet-based applications since 1995 for a myriad of clients, including Major League Baseball, ESPN, Morgan Stanley, Condé Nast, IBM, Dow Jones, American Express, Verizon, and many others.

Based in New York, he has been developing Flex applications since the earliest days of Flex 1. As an instructor, Jeff is certified to teach all of Adobe’s courses on Flex, AIR, Flash, and ColdFusion development. He is also a frequent speaker at Adobe Development Conferences and user groups.

Jeff has worked as author and technical editor for several books, including Adobe Flex 3: Training from the Source and Breaking Out of the Web Browser with Adobe AIR, and sits on the editorial board of Web Developers & Designers Journal. Jeff does not know Japanese but pretends to understand Michael when he’s speaking Japanese.

Well have refreshments courtesy of ING Direct and prizes from our various sponsors and another prize pack from NewEgg. This will be a very special evening with one of Adobe’s gurus so make sure you make a note of it and we’ll see you on March 7!

PLEASE RSVP FOR THE FLEX ROAD SHOW HERE –>

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To start our evening off, LAdobe’s own Adam Bell of dataTV, will continue his focus on the new interactive features regarding InDesign with ePublishing and the Digital Publishing Suite. How are magazines from Wired to Vanity Fair moving from the print space to the iPad? In this session, Adam will continue where he left off from January’s presentation and actually show how to get the Folio Builder and why you need i. Then he’ll create a live working version of an interactive DPS app created.directly from InDesign! No Flash, Dreamweaver, Edge or any interactive tool will be used. Just InDesign only.

The second portion of the evening will come from California State University, LA instructor Gary Coyne. Now normally, Gary’s job at CSULA is that of ‘Scientific Glassblower’ in their Chemistry dept. What does that have to do with Adobe? Well, he’s also a Photoshop expert. In particular of the usage of High Dynamic Range (HDR) imaging in Photoshop. In Gary’s session you’ll see why HDR is so important in Photoshop, how to take HDR photos, how to use Adobe Bridge for full HDR benefit, how to process in Photomatix into 32 bit images and then tone map the image into a 16 or 8 bit image, what’s taking place during tone mapping to the image (so the user has better control on what’s happening), followed by post-processing in Photoshop. This promises to be one of the most unique and informative presentations we have ever presented in Photoshop featuring a tool most Photoshop users never think about…but should.

Well have prizes from our various sponsors and another prize pack from NewEgg. Remember, our next meeting will be in Culver City so make sure you make a note of it and we’ll see you on February 23!

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With these great new releases coming in the first half of 2012, we want to make sure Adobe’s customers have plenty of time to discover which offering is best product offering for their needs. Therefore, LAdobe is pleased to announce that Adobe will offer special introductory upgrade pricing on Creative Suite 6 to customers who own CS3 or CS4. This offer will be available from the time CS6 is released until December 31, 2012. More details on this offer, as well as any introductory offers for existing customers to move to Creative Cloud membership, will be announced when CS6 and Creative Cloud are released later this year.

This is an OFFER — NOT a promotion.

The “Introductory upgrade offer” will be available to shrink wrap boxed software, and licensing.  The offer will be applicable to all Routes to Market, regardless of IF Creative Cloud is offered.  This is specifically for CS6 perpetual upgrades.

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For our first meeting of 2012,we will focus on a program we haven’t looked at in a long time. And one of the programs that has seen some of the greatest amount of change in the entire Adobe Creative Suite. That program is InDesign. A program known mainly for print designers, but it is starting to offer unique, interactive features as well.

The majority of our presentation will be from noted Photoshop and InDesign authority, Beverly Houwing. Beverly runs the Squid Gallery and is a noted photographer and artist. She has had her works shown in galleries throughout the Los Angeles area and beyond. For this presentation, Beverly will show off many of the unique effects and styles available to InDesign users and how to get the best results out of them.

Her topics will include how to apply styles creatively and efficiently: Demystifying complex styles: Next Style, Nested Styles, Smart Text Reflow, Keep Options, building a table of contents, bulleted & numbered lists, creating Cross References & using GREP with Styles and Conditions. She’ll also cover working with Photoshop files and Illustrator files in InDesign to manage layers, layer comps and edit content and creating “layer masks” in InDesign. Using Effects and transforming type for cool styles. Finally, she’ll look into how to create a fantastic Preflight Profile for the way you need to have publications printed and sharing it with those who need to build their documents using the same guidelines.

From there, LAdobe’s own Adam Bell of dataTV, will focus on some of the new interactive features regarding InDesign with ePublishing and the Digital Publishing Suite. How are magazines from Wired to Vanity Fair moving from the print space to the iPad? In this session, Adam will show examples of this and then explain how they accomplish this…directly from InDesign! No Flash, Dreamweaver, Edge or any interactive tool is required.

Well have snacks from our new sponsor, Gamer Food, as well as book prizes from our various sponsors and another prize pack from NewEgg. Remember, our next meeting will be in Culver City so make sure you make a note of it and we’ll see you on January 26!

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