My Photoshop Classroom

I’d like to take a break from our normal tips format to announce something big. CreativeTechs is offering off a free, 10-week, worldwide, Photoshop course.

Want to enroll? Sign-up here: Photoshop CS4 Course Enrollment.

Jason Hoppe, our Adobe Certified Instructor, has designed a comprehensive course that covers Photoshop CS4 in detail. If you’ve been meaning to improve your Photoshop skills, now is the perfect opportunity:

Week 1, Feb 26 – Interface, Tools, and Shortcuts
Week 2, Mar 5 – Photoshop Layers
Week 3, Mar 12 – Selections
Week 4, Mar 19 – Advanced Selections
Week 5, Mar 26 – Masks
Week 6, Apr 2 – Pen Tool / Shape Layers
Week 7, Apr 9 – Drawing Tools / Brushes
Week 8, Apr 16 – Retouching
Week 9, Apr 23 – Color Correction pt 1
Week 10, Apr 30 – Color Correction pt 2

And yes, you can pass this offer along to friends, or even post it on your blog. Help spread the word. We need a minimum of 1,000 people enrolled to make this free class viable.

Read on for an extended Q&A, and to ask your own questions in the comments.

Q: What Time Do Classes Start?

A: That depends on where you live. People attend these workshops from all over the world. We start at 11AM Thursday mornings in Seattle. Here are the start times for time zones in the United States:

2PM – Eastern (New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Florida)
1PM – Central (Chicago, Minneapolis, Dallas)
12PM – Mountain (Denver, Phoenix)
11AM – Pacific (Seattle, Los Angeles)
10AM – Alaska
9AM – Hawaii

For international participants, follow this link to see how 11AM in Seattle translates to around time zones around the world:What time is 11AM in Seattle? Here are some example start times for different cities:

7PM – London, Dublin, Casablanca, Reykjavik
8PM – Amsterdam, Madrid, Oslo, Prague, Zagreb
9PM – Athens, Jerusalem, Johannesburg, Kyiv
10PM – Moscow, Baghdad, Khartoum
11PM – Dubai, United Arab Emirates
2AM Friday – Bangkok, Hanoi, Jakarta
3AM Friday – Hong Kong, Beijing
4AM Friday – Tokyo, Seoul, Perth
5AM Friday – Brisbane, Vladivostok
6AM Friday – Sydney, Melbourne
8AM Friday – Auckland

Q: How Long Are Classes?

A: Each class is 60 minutes long, with an additional 30-45 minutes for audience questions. The Q&A is typically pretty valuable, so plan to stick around if you can.

Q: What If I Don’t Have Photoshop CS4?

A: This class is taught with Photoshop CS4 on the Macintosh. However most of the learning applies to earlier versions of Photoshop, as well as PC users.

Q: How Many People Can Attend Each Webinar?

A: Our Webinar tool, GoToWebinar, has a limit of 1,000 attendees per class. Based on the popularity of free Photoshop training, we expect to reach that limit on many classes.

Q: Can I Download Recorded Copies of Classes?

A: We record a high-resolution copy of each class, and we plan to make recorded copies available for a slight fee. If a class does not record properly (which has happened before) we’ll typically run a special repeat of that class in order to capture a clean recording.

Q: Can I Record Copies of the Class Myself?

A: Sure. Once you’ve logged on as an attendee, you are free to record a class using any number of screen recording tools. While we don’t mind you recoding these classes for your own use, we do ask that you don’t post those recordings on the Internet, or share them with others.

Q: How Can This Be Free?

A: We are trying to make a big splash, and we love working with a large audience. Help us spread the word. If we continue to attract a full audience, we’ll be able to keep offering these types of free courses for InDesign, Illustrator, Fireworks, Dreamweaver, and other Adobe products.

Q: Why Are You Doing This?

A: That’s a question I get a lot as I describe our crazy free-training scheme. A big part is that both Jason and I love this type of teaching. We’ve put a lot of work into this format over the years, and it is gratifying seeing larger and larger numbers of people benefit from what we are sharing.

From a business-side, we’re testing a theory. I believe that over the long-run we’ll end up generating more income by giving classes like these away for free, than we have made so far selling one workshop at a time. The live webinars themselves are free. We’ll charge a small fee for recorded copies of previous classes and other downloads. We’ll see how that works out.

Q: How Long Did It Take to Develop This Hybrid Format?

A: We’ve spent the last two years developing a new approach to software training for today’s creative professionals. We started with live weekly mini-workshops in our Seattle classroom. We experimented with online webinars. This year we combined the two with our new hybrid workshop/webinar training format.

Last month we started stress-testing our system to see how many participants we can handle at one time (with terrific results).

Q: Can I Post an Invitation on my Blog?

A: Yes. Please help spread the word. We need as many people as possible enrolled to make this free class format viable for us. You can post a link to the following URL, which we will keep updated as details change:

http://creativetechs.com/freephotoshopcourse

As a thank-you, we’ll be posting a regular list of the top blogs and websites where people found out about this unique free Photoshop class