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Sunday, January 04, 2009

New Year's Resolutions - What Skills Will You Gain This Year?

I've got two primary goals for 2009 for developing new skills. First, I want English grammar to be second nature. For example, I'm still unsure about where to put commas when I use quotation marks in my prose. To accomplish this, I'll keep a copy of my Strunk and White right next to the computer and look up everything and I mean absoltuely everything that I am unsure of.

I'll also stop ending sentences with prepositions.

Second, I want to become facile with Adobe Creative Suite. That includes Photoshop, Flash, Illustrator and Premiere. I'll start with Photoshop and begin posting more retouched, stylized photos like the one I did of the drainage pipe. Right now, I don't understand how they do layering or how to create masks. As I go along, I'll post my creations and the Photoshop tools I used to make them.

How about you? What will you be able to do on January 1, 2010 that you can't do right now?

Update: Adobe has Adobe TV which shows you basic tutorials for their products, including Photoshop. Way cool.

3 comments:

  1. Anonymous12:03 AM

    My human found a great Quicktime video tutorial website called http://www.lynda.com - it includes all the Adobe programs and lots more. The first few lessons of each tutorial are free, and if you want to continue there's a reasonable monthly fee which gives you access to everything in their library. She learned some great tips for my 2009 calendars, is teaching herself Drupal to update my website (eventually!) and learning InDesign to update my book, if we decide to stay indie. Seriously worth checking out if you want more in depth Creative Suite lessons.

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  2. Anonymous12:04 AM

    BTW, I'm a cat and I don't need any new skills in 2009. I'm already perfect.

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