Los Angeles Adobe User Group

Tonight's LAdobe meeting canceled

Due to problems regarding our host site, we have decided to cancel tonight's (10/23) meeting at the Art Institute and reschedule our speakers for early 2009. We apologize for the inconvenience in this matter. Our next meeting is tentatively scheduled for Thursday, December 7th at 7pm with a look at Fireworks CS4 by Adam Bell, Dreamweaver CS4 with Adobe's John Schuman and the finals of Website Nightmares as we will crown the person or team that will design the look of the new LAdobe website for 2009 in addition to winning a copy of Creative Suite 4 and other prizes.
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Website Nightmares

LAdobe needs some help. And you can earn a lot in the process by helping us out!

As you know, Adobe's Creative Suite 4 was just announced and there's a lot of excitement surrounding it. However, with the economic woes we're currently experiencing, many designers and developers cannot afford to upgrade or buy a whole new suite of tools with everything else going up. LAdobe understands that and we want to reward one of our members with a copy of Creative Suite 4 for free!

You just have to redesign our website.

Yea, our website is showing signs of age and it needs a new coat of paint. Instead of just designing it myself, I'm opening it up to one of our members to redesign the site's appearance as we plan some major upgrades to the site for early 2009. We're planning to move to a new host, offer new features including forums, better photo galleries and all sorts of nifty features we've been planning on doing for some time.

What we need is a new User Interface design that sleeker, sexier and yet still works within our framework. You know the drill. Logo on top, cne column for content, one for banners and links, a footer for copyright and sponsor links. The only thing you can't do is redesign the logo. Beyond that, your imagination will determine what the new site will be like.

And for doing so, you'll receive a copy of one of three Creative Suite 4 bundles (either the Web, Print or Production), a bunch of web design books from O'Reilly, a credit on the LAdobe site and more!

So how do I enter?

First off, this isn't Photoshop Idol. You don't have to send over your portfolio. All you have to do is email LAdobe your entry with your name, company, email address and phone number. That's it. We'll accept entries until November 1 and then we'll pick three names at random and those three people will be contacted via email that they are a finalist and that they need to start prepating. On Thursday, December 7th at 7pm, we'll have our finals where each of the three finalists will show comps of what they think the new site will look like and a panel of judges will determine the winner. Once the winner is announced, he or she will work together with LAdobe to create the final comps and hep troubleshoot the redesign as we prepare for relaunch.

Since this is for CS4, all LAdobe members are allowed to enter. Even those who've won CS3 in the past since we're moving up a version. You must get your entry in by November 1 at midnight PT and only Los Angeles and Orange County residents are allowed to enter. You must be able to show up and present your designs at our December 7th meeting. Students, Freelancers, Studios are all allowed to enter. Good luck!...

Flash Animation Contest to win CS4

If you don't want to enter our Website Nightmares Competition, you can also enter Christopher Ross' Winter Wonderland Flash Animation Contest which also offers CS4 as a prize.Besides winning CS4, you'll also get $1,000 to boot. Great way for young talent to get noticed in the Flash world.
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Adobe Configurator Announced

On his blog, John Nack has announced Adobe Configurator for Photoshop. Think of Configurator as a box of Legos--an app that lets you drag and drop all the tools and menu items in Photoshop, call actions & scripts, and add widgets (images, videos, other SWFs, etc.). More info can be found here.
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Links to CS4 Tutorials

Creative Suite 4 just came out but already there are a plethora of tutorials on how to use the new features of various apps in the suite. Here's a bunch for you to peruse.

GoTo And Learn
Layers Magazine
dekePod

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Creative Suite 4 Launches

Welcome to Brilliant! Adobe has officially launched Creative Suite 4 featuring updates to all of your favorite programs. A whole new User Interface, 3D Object Painting in Photoshop, Multiple Artboards in Illustrator, Live Preflight in InDesign, Live View of Websites in Dreamweaver, Interactive PDF creation in Fireworks, even Inverse Kinematics in Flash! And that's just some of the highlights. Watch the live presentation of CS4 here and come join LAdobe at the CS4 Launch Party this Thursday night at 7PM at the Art Institute California-Hollywood with a special presentation by Photoshop guru Stephen Burns.
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9/25: CS4 is going to be Brilliant

Join LAdobe on Thursday night, September 25th at 7pm at the Art Institute of California-Hollywood on 3440 Wilshire Blvd. Parking is available for free after 5PM at the garage behind the Art Institute building on Wilshire and Maricopa. You can validate your parking ticket inside the Art Institute. There will be a guard at the back of the building housing the Art Institute (in front of the parking facility). Just let him know you are here for the LAdobe meeting and you should be allowed in with no problems or hassles.

This will be no ordinary meeting. Adobe is about to reveal Creative Suite 4 and if you've read blogs like The Flash Blog, you know exactly what is going on. On September 23rd, Adobe will webcase a special event celebrating the release and showing off the new features. We will show that webcast and then delve right into Photoshop with one of our most popular speakers ever.

One of our most popular sessions last year was when San Diego's Stephen Burns came up north to lecture us on Photoshop. It was one of our most well-reviewed presenters ever in our two year history and now Stephen is coming back for an encore. Once again, Stephen will take over the night and present all sorts of tips and advice on Photoshop CS3 and likely CS4. This is a must see session for any Photoshop user and it's all presented free of charge. Please mark September 25th on your calendars now! You can not afford to miss this night!

Besides the usual prizes, we'll also have drinks from Function Beverages and copies of Stephen's book, Advanced Photoshop CS3 Trickery and FX courtesy of Course PTR Publishing. There will also be a lot of special limited edition Adobe swag to giveaway that night too. I'll tell you more in an upcoming email blast. This is one special extended session and we look forward to having you over on September 25th so you can be 'brilliant'....

Wiley Book Discounts and Prizes

We're thrilled to announce that Wiley Publishing has become our latest sponsor at LAdobe. Wiley will be offering discounts to our members each month and will also be giving away three books each month for our user group. With so many good choices, we'd love to hear which books you'd like LAdobe to order for future prize giveaways. Email LAdobe with your suggestions.
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Oct 10: FlashPitt

If you're interested in heading out east to Steeltown for some Primanti sandwiches and a day's worth of Flash education, check out FlashPitt on October 10th at the Sheraton Station Square. Two tracks of sessions will run from 9am until about 6pm, then we’ll finish it all off with an after party full of fun and networking opportunities. LAdobe members get a discount by typing in code AUG778 on their order form. There’s also a 10% studio discount. If you have a group of five or more attending, email info@flashpitt.com for a discount code to get 10% off.
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Flex 3.1 Released

Adobe has just announced updates to both Flex 3 SDK and Flex Builder. Flex SDK has been bumped to v3.1 and Flex Builder has been upgraded to v3.0.1. Numerous bug fixes on both. Read more about it from Matt Chotin' piece at the Adobe Developer Center.
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Special Announcement: LAdobe has a new home

As some of you know, LAdobe hasn't had a actual meeting since our event in May. We were supposed to have one in June only to arrive at what is now our previous home at Moviola only to find the doors locked.

What transpired was that there had been a change in management at Moviola and as a result, the new management was never properly informed that our user group even existed. Our May meeting almost didn't happen if it wasn't for some last minute calls to the new management to set up a room ASAP. Fortunately, our May meeting happened and we were able to award Andrew Kavanagh. However, numerous attempts to contact Moviola after that were futile and thus the debacle that occured in June.

At that point, many user groups would have folded their tents in frustration and given up. Not us! Immediately both myself and many LAdobe members went ahead to try to find a new permanent location immediately. Special appreciation goes to all members who assisted in suggesting or making contact with potential facilities for our group. Finally, we narrowed the search to two location near Moviola in Hollywood and finally decided upon the Art Institute of California-Hollywood (the former California Design College) and thanks to Garick Chan, we now have a new home! The facility will offer all members free WiFi, great seating, projectors and pretty much everything else we need to keep our meetings going for a long time to come. Parking will be available on the street and also possibly in their parking garage (more info to come). The meetings and membership, as usual, will continue to be free. The only difference will be that from now on, you will likely have ti RSVP in advance for the meetings as the school does have a security guard on site and he will have to let you in. Thus, we'll have to have a guest list. We'll have complete RSVP info in the next email blast in about a week or two.

I thank all of you for being patient and for understanding the situation. Fortunately, thanks to our friends at one of our new sponsors, NATPE, many of our best LAdobe members were able to attend the annual LATV Festival compliments of NATPE and Adobe. We are planning more collaborations with NATPE in the future as well as with other organizations in the LA area. More information in regards to this will be presented in the future.

As you'll find out, we've been busy setting up new meetings, bringing back great speakers and attracting new sponsors with killer prizes. I think you'll be delighted about what is coming next from LAdobe....

Peachpit's new Design Magazine

Peachpit/New Riders has just announced a new design magazine called reFresh: The Interactive Magazine for Creatives and they are placing the first issue of the magazine online for you to download at your leisure.

The goal with this new magazine is to "refresh" you creatively by helping you think about design and technology in a new way. We aim not only to instruct, but also to inspire. reFresh delivers an experience that goes beyond words and images—it's a digital magazine where you'll find video and audio clips that both show and tell you about the featured tools, techniques, and people.

They plan to offer 12 issues of reFresh per year for only $99 and they invite you and your members to download the PDF (162 MB) for free and tell us what you think by completing the survey and those who do by July 31, 2008 will receive a free copy of Nash Editions: Photography and the Art of Digital Printing: a $50 value!
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Acrobat.com - Work. Together. Anywhere.

Adobe has just launched acrobat.com which is a new suite of online services hosted by Adobe that you can use to create documents together and share them with others. It helps people get document work done faster, without email attachments or version confusion, and it makes your documents look great so that you and your work look great, too.

acrobat.com starts with three distinctive applications:

Adobe Buzzword for creating and reviewing documents together.
Adobe ConnectNow for holding full-fledged online web conferences with up to three people.
The Acrobat.com organizer for sharing 5GB of files with others online, including the ability to convert 5 documents to PDF and embed your documents in blogs, wikis or other web pages.

More on this new development is available on this blog post and we'll cover this in full at the next LAdobe meeting on June 26th/...

Photoshop Idol 2008: And the Idol is....

On Thursday night, May 22nd, LAdobe celebrated its' second anniversary by holding its' second edition of Photoshop Idol: The Search for the next great design star in Los Angeles. Our finalists were Andrew Kavanagh, Justin King, Daniel Kramer and Jeremiah Lyles. And the winner was....Andrew Kavanagh! By designing a print ad for Presidential hopeful Barack Obama he received a series of eight Photoshop Books from Peachpit, a Digital Photo Frame from EDGE Tech Corp and of course, a copy of Creative Suite 3! We shot video of the conclusion of Photoshop Idol and here's the big announcement of Andrew's big win!

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Do you a non-profit who has a Website Nightmare?

LAdobe is looking for non-profit organizations who are currently looking to have their website redesigned by one of our members. For our final meeting of 2009 in December, we plan to hold our first ever 'Website Nightmares' competition where one of our designers or studios will design a website for a local area non-profit organization in exchange for a copy of Creative Suite and other prizes yet to be determined. If you know of a non-profit that would like to see their site redesigned, please contact LAdobe with the contact's information and how you know them.
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CS4 Betas now at Labs!

Adobe has just released three new public betas of Dreamweaver CS4, Fireworks CS4 and Soundbooth CS4 for download at Adobe Labs. Dreamweaver's new features include Live View, a new Code Navigator, HTML Data Sets and the ability to drag and drop and Photoshop document and make it an image Smart Object. Fireworks' new features include CSS Design Layouts, PDF Export, Live Style Improvements and AIR Authoring. Soundbooth's new features include new tools video editors, designers, and others who do not specialize in audio need to accomplish their everyday work such as Arranging audio files on multiple tracks, Making quick edits and applying fades, Matching volume levels with a single command, Recording and polishing voice-overs, Previewing MP3 compression quality and more. We are already planning to devote portions of the June 26th LAdobe meeting to showcasing many of these new features.
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Write a Flex/AIR tutorial. Win CS3

Not creative enough to go for Photoshop Idol? More technical and a good writer? Have we got a contest for you. Well, actually it's Sitepoint Blogs and Adobe is sponsoring a competition offering copies of CS3 Web Premium Bundle to 2 excellent writers willing to write an article on Flex or AIR between now and May 4th. So get your typing fingers in motion and come up with a great article. We can't wait to read what you have to say.
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Lightroom 2.0 beta announced

Adobe has just launched their public beta of Lightroom 2.0, which helps photographers quickly work with RAW format images. The beta is available to all users for 30 days. However, if you own Lightroom 1.0, you can use this beta up until the completion date of the beta cycle of August 31th.

Enhancements to Lightroom including the following:

Localized corrections — Enhance specific areas of an image for unsurpassed nondestructive flexibility and control reminiscent of the traditional darkroom dodge and burn experience.
Improved organizational tools — Find the images you need quickly and easily.
Multiple monitor support — Add an additional monitor to efficiently manage photographic workflow and presentation.
Flexible print package functionality — Create custom layouts containing multiple sizes of a photograph on a single page.
64-bit support — Lightroom 2.0 now takes advantage of the latest hardware architectures with improved memory handling and performance.

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Photoshop Express Public Beta

Adobe has just launched their new Photoshop Express public beta, a free Rich Internet Application (RIA) available to anyone who wants to store, sort and show off digital photos with eye-catching effects. During the public beta period, Adobe will solicit Photoshop Express user feedback on product features and functionality, which will continue to evolve over time. As the newest addition to the Photoshop family line, Photoshop Express has taken much of Adobe's best image editing technology and made it simple and accessible to a new online audience. Photoshop Express allows users to store up to 2 gigabytes of images online for free, make edits to their photos, and share them online in creative ways....

March 27: Illustrator and Photoshop Illustrations

Join LAdobe on Thursday night, March 27th at 7pm at Moviola, a digital training facility located on 1135 N. Mansfield Avenue right near Santa Monica and Highland. Admission and Parking is totally free as is always the case. This month is we'll have presentations for the Illustrator and Photoshop faithful.

We'll start out with a look at some of the Hidden Tricks of the Trade in Illustrator featuring Adam Bell of dataTV who'll showcase some of the unique features of the Appearance Panel and the ways to create shapes and fills using LivePaint. Following this, we'll feature the Illustration skills of Lon Levin, an Art Center grad who previously worked in Hollywood as a studio executive, creating design and artwork. He was a "behind the scenes guy" on many successful campaigns and property launches. He previously worked at Saban Entertainment, KingWorld and Warner Bros. Television Distribution. Today, Lon is creating his own line of children's books and for this meeting, Lon will showcase how he created his licensed artwork and digital designs using mainly Photoshop and a little Illustrator on the side. If you're into learning Photoshop as a fine art tool, you'll definitely be fascinated with this presentation.

We'll also show LAdobe contributions to Adobe's 30OnAir project and of course, have the usual swag giveaways from Adobe, Peachpit, O'Reilly and more. Hope to see you in for this month's LAdobe event this Thursday night.
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