Photoshop and Illustrator

[Peter Normington]

Hi Nicholas.
you have outlayed a small fortune for cs4 ans x4 suites,
not sure abour x4 but cs4 comes with pretty good video tutorials. which are the first place to start,
you are in for a long learning curve though, if you have not used previous versions of both programs. its similar to jumping into an F1 car without ever driving before!

Peter

[Martin Grimmer]

Hi Nicholas,

there are quite a few tutorials on You Tube.

I subscribe to Lynda.com – about £18 month (not just adobe software). Seems to recall when I got my CS4 suite that they included free month of Lynda training – not sure if they still do.

Martin

[TonyMoore]

The usual mistake most people make when trying to learn a programme is biting off to much to start with.
The tools on both illustrator and photoshop are virtually identicle.
As a designer, my advice would be to learn illustrator first as this will give you a much clearer grounding when getting to grips with photoshop.
Start of getting used to the tools, drawing and changing the shape of lines.
One tip that works really well for me is you have 3 arrow tools for selecting items.
A black one a white one and a white one with a crosshair.
You should only ever need the white one.
This allows you to select single points, if however you hold down the shift key teh crosshair appears and it allows you to select a complete object.
To learn to design using illustrator, when i take on a new member of staff, i usually give them a simple business card that we have done, and then i tell them to scan it in, place it into illustrator and then try to recreate it.
This stops you having to think about design whilst learning.
Good Luck

[Peter Dee]

Definitely Youtube.

Decide what you need to do and do a search.
I have found it the fastest and easiest way to learn.

[Rich Goddard]

I used photoshop way before using illustrator. I needed to make the jump over so I took my next job, opened up illustrator and anything I needed to know I tapped straight into google.

That is how I got up to speed with the program. I’ve tried tutorials and tutorial video’s before, coming from an AutoCad and 3D background. I found them not necessarily relevant to what I was doing – so googled for help as and when needed.

There are alot of forums and blogs with Illustrator-specific areas…google gave me what I needed at the time.

Hope this helps…if not you’ve just read all this waffle for little benefit :lol1:

Rich

[James Martin]

The classroom in a book series is good I found

[Catalin Dretcanu]

Do you have any background in graphic design? Did you use any graphic design software before? If yes then you will get very quickly with the basics on these 2. Youtube and some other websites like psdtuts or http://photoshoptutorials.ws/ will help a lot. There are lots of websites with tutorials on the internet. Good luck!