Sizing Your Images for eLearning Using Photoshop (From My Latest Livestream)

In this video tutorial, I show you how I resize my images to be appropriate for my eLearning projects.

Captivate Software Simulation Roundtripping with Photoshop

In this video tutorial, I'll show you how you can roundtrip between your images in your software simulation and Photoshop CC.

Do This to Your Images Before Adding to Your Captivate eLearning

I saw a post on the forums recently where a person didn't understand why the images they imported into their eLearning project were not showing up, were slow to load, or were showing up as red boxes. My experience is that the images being selected were too large for the elearning course. This video is my workflow for optimising and importing stock photography into my eLearning project, so they take up as little space as possible and still look good.

Optimize Your Images for Your Captivate eLearning

This video clip from my last live stream shows you what I do to optimize my images for my Adobe Captivate eLearning using. Photoshop or whatever image editing software you use.

I'd Like to Try Some eLearning Time Travel

It's really amazing what we take for granted. In this video 8 Photoshop experts attempt to use Photoshop 1.0. It is clear that we just expect certain things to be there. Clearly many of the features that we use today were introduced along the way.

I'd like to try this with Adobe Captivate. Actually before Captivate was called Captivate, it was Robodemo. It would be really interesting to see how I could manage. My first version of Captivate was version 2.0. One thing I can attest to is that rapid development exists today in Captivate 8 whereas in version 2.0, I had a painstakingly slow process to develop any courseware. I think I will try to trackdown an early version of Cp and see how I manage.

I Couldn't Live Without Photoshop

I mean, I guess I could live without Photoshop, however I don't like to think about what that would be like. As an Instructional Designer, I write narration for my online courses, design interactions for my students to complete and build course structures for the courses to follow, however at some point the courses I design need to look like something. I rely on a mixture of stock photography, graphics that I dream up, and my own photography.  One of the tricks I use is to ensure my images are in some way uniform, mostly in size but also in colour as well.  It gives my designs a professional look and feel you don't usually see in the typical corporate PowerPoint training (I hate PowerPoint).

I found this Photoshop CS5 tutorial for beginners through the pop-up that shows up in Adobe Captivate and I thought I would share it.  I haven't gone through it yet, but it looks pretty good. It contains over 13 hours of teaching material.  Based on the topic list, which I scanned, it looks like I could learn a few things here and there.

Adobe Software for Free!

Like most people in their professions, instructional designers rely on a certain set of tools to get their jobs done. For me it is Microsoft Office, and the Adobe eLearning Suite. I currently have e-Learning Suite 2.5 which includes Photoshop, Flash, Dreamweaver, and of course Adobe Captivate. Many newer instructional designers have often asked if there are free alternatives to the software I use. I have never found an eLearning authoring tool that is truly free, however Gimp is a decent Photoshop alternative. For Dreamweaver, which is an HTML authoring tool, there are many choices. I personally have used KompoZer before, and it does a decent job.

Of course now I would answer a little differently. It seems that Adobe has decided to make the Creative Suite CS2 software all freely available to download. Creative Suite is a bundle of some of Adobe’s popular software, which includes, Adobe Illustrator, Indesign, Photoshop, Acrobat Pro and more. Perhaps this is a mistake, perhaps not. I personally would download this software and copy down the posted serial numbers as soon as possible, just in case. You can find all this software bundled together, or available to download separately from here:

http://www.adobe.com/downloads/cs2_downloads/index.html

Update
So it seems that Adobe have added the following comment to this page since I published my blog post:


Adobe has disabled the activation server for CS2 products, including Acrobat 7, because of a technical issue. These products were released more than seven years ago, do not run on many modern operating systems, and are no longer supported.

Adobe strongly advises against running unsupported and outdated software. The serial numbers below should only be used by customers who legitimately purchased CS2 or Acrobat 7 and need to maintain their current use of these products.

PhotoShop CS6 in Beta at Adobe Labs

I've been testing out Windows 8 for quite a few months now and I've felt less than enthusiastic about this new platform.

What I am excited about is the the new PhotoShop which has been out for a few weeks.  I'm going to download it today from Adobe Labs and check out some of the cool new features.  Here is the link for those that might be interested:

http://labsdownload.adobe.com/pub/labs/photoshopcs6/photoshopcs6_p1_win_032112.zip

Adobe eLearning Suite 2

I recently purchase the Adobe eLearning Suite 2 to not only keep up to date but to replace some earlier versions of software that was not compatible with my new laptop.  My new laptop uses Windows 7 which is a 64 bit operating system.  My copies of Acrobat, Captivate, and Dreamweaver were not compatible with this system so I was forced to make the jump to the latest versions of these.  By choosing the eLearning Suite I was also able to get the latest versions of Flash, Photoshop and few other lesser known applications from Adobe.

Normally this software would run about $1800; however I took advantage of an educational discount available to me as a student.  Earlier this year I had completed an adult training certification which entitled me to this discount.  I ended up paying only $600 for the suite.  This proved to be less than purchasing any two of the more known applications within the suite.  If you are taking even a single course at your local college you can take advantage of this offering.  The Adobe eLearning suite is extremely useful to anyone within the Instructional Design field.