lynda.com
A Close Look

Welcome to lynda.com, and to one of the easiest and most comfortable learning situations I can imagine.

I covered the simple history of lynda.com a while back in another article I wrote for MyMac.com while I was attending the Macworld Conference and Expo earlier this year… Lynda.com is THE place to go for your “web” education. I had the good fortune to meet and speak with some of the folks who make lynda.com tick. It is through them that I was given a temporary window to the site in order to look around, get comfortable, and enjoy the video tutorials at my leisure.

The concept of lynda.com is so natural and user friendly that one could consider it a gift. Sure, it costs money to join. With unlimited access to the site and all the material at your fingertips the cost is inconsequential. It’s $25 a month for around-the-clock access.

I chose Aperture as my test class because a) I don’t know anything about it, b) It could help me organize my digital photography experience, and c) I read a little about it in Popular Photography magazine and apparently a lot of professional photographers use it, so I’m curious.

The two experts lynda.com uses to teach this particular course are Derrick Story and Scott Bourne. These guys have been digital photography pros and teachers for over twenty years.

One of the features I enjoy most about lynda.com is the ability to go back to any point in time of any lesson and replay it to your heart’s content. If you have trouble grasping some of the complexities of your chosen subject, this feature alone is worth its weight in gold. Imagine being able to stop a lesson, check out what you’ve just learned on one of the exercise files provided, and, if you still don’t quite understand all of the new lesson, go back to the exact place you need in the lesson and hear/see it again. And again. And again. Get the idea? You can’t go wrong.

I like the conversational way a tutorial is presented. These two authors talk to each other, and us, as though we’re all in the same place together. They explain the use of the software, its limitations and contributions. It’s easy listening and very reassuring.

When you first open up your subject of choice, mine being Aperture, you will find a Table of Contents list. There’s the Introduction and Welcome which gives a short overview of what will be covered. And then, on to the meat and potatoes. For Aperture there are 10 chapters, each with its own list of tasks and subjects. In Chapter 1, Getting Started, the chapter is broken up into several sub-headings:

What is Aperture
Is Aperture a Replacement for Photoshop
Introduction to RAW
RAW Fine Tune
Running Aperture Successfully
Essential Preferences
Understanding Key Aperture Terms
Understanding the Interface

Each subject is covered completely and naturally segues into the next subject, and so on. The subsequent chapters are treated in the same manner so it’s very easy for the student to access any part of the subject matter in mere seconds. For instance, if you’re already familiar with the software and some of its workings you can easily skip ahead to a place that would be more appropriate to your experience.

The learning experience is key to the success of lynda.com. Unless the site is completely user-friendly it would collapse under its own weight. But CEO Lynda keeps it light as a feather throughout, giving the student a feeling of complete control over the life of the entire subject/lesson format.

I have to say, at this point, that I don’t have Aperture yet, and I may or may not even purchase Aperture. But I’m curious enough at this point in my digital photographic life to take this course. I can already tell, even though I’ve only been through the Raw Fine Tuning lesson, that Aperture could be of great benefit to me, IF, and that’s a big IF, I choose to start shooting in RAW. Does the program work with JPEG? You bet. But RAW is Aperture’s showcase and is the preferential shooting file of professional photographers. Besides, the lessons are so easy to listen to and follow that I’d rather be doing this than watching another rerun of Ozzie and Harriet.

Okay, so let’s say I decide to go for it. I want to buy and use Aperture. It just so happens that in the chapter sub-heading Running Aperture Successfully our authors give us the lowdown on what kind of equipment it takes to run the program at its peak. The long and short of it is that I’m going to need the fastest graphics card I can buy, the fastest hard disc available to me, and the most RAM I can afford. Hmm. I’m sitting here with my MacBook hanging out, thinking about putting Aperture on it, but nooo, Apple does not recommend my little MacBook for this power hungry program. The MacBook Pro with 2G, 7200-RPM, and best graphics card is recommended.

So, what should I do? Sell my MacBook and run out to buy the fastest MacBook Pro I can find? Well, the authors tell me that the program WILL run with the MacBook I have, but it’s just not RECOMMENDED by Apple. In other words, Aperture will not run as fast or with as much efficiency without all the recommended hardware. Should this stop me from getting the application? That’s a call I’ll make when the time comes. I’m still “interviewing” the entire class. But now I’m educated and informed. A good place to be.

As far as Aperture replacing Photoshop, the two programs are quite different in one very huge way. As our guide, Scott Bourne, who has written books on the subject of Photoshop tells us, “No way.” Apple actually wrote Aperture to work “in concert with, not instead of” Photoshop. Aperture is much more a “work-flow” tool, whereas Photoshop is an image editing, pixel changing tool. But Apple foresaw the drove of Photoshop users out there who could also use Aperture to their advantage, so they even made a “hot key” which will seamlessly switch images back and forth between the two programs. This will allow the photographer the luxury of setting up a workflow in a much more efficient way than just Photoshop alone will allow, and at the same time the image can be switched between the two programs for image editing purposes. Our guide goes on to explain that the photographer can do about 90% of the editing needs of an image right there in Aperture. But when editing an image will involve “Layers” the switch to Photoshop is a must.

One of the biggies about Aperture is the amount of space it takes to do what it does. As explained by our guides, Photoshop can be very memory hungry. An image which contains let’s say 10 MB, when manipulated in Photoshop, will keep those 10 MB, and add even more as the program resets and adjusts pixels as per instructed. So you wind up with the original 10 MB file, and a new 10 MB file which is the adjusted one. Or even more files as you go through layers of adjustments. You can see that after a short time a photographer could consume his entire hard drive because of all the originals and fixes, all of which usually get saved. But Aperture does not use the same techniques because it’s not an image editor. It’s mainly there for photographers to choose which images to work on.

Since it was designed for professional photographers, Aperture assumes that there will be a myriad of images from which to choose. This is Aperture’s game. To make it easy to pick through all those images without wasting a lot of time. Compare and select. And there are image manipulation tools all over Aperture, but these are recorded as “instructions” instead of Photoshop’s actual new image with all the pixels. If you Crop in Aperture the original is still there, and the crop is recorded as an instruction, not an actual change to the image. Therefore, the Aperture instructions use a mere few KB instead of MB, which will save the photographer tons of room on his hard drive.

What I like most about the way lynda.com presents these lessons is that our tutors use practical experience and give examples so that the student will understand WHY these things work the way they do in the real world. It’s not just a bunch of technical jargon. It’s plain and very practical. In other words, it makes sense.

I’ve been a Photoshop user for about 5 years. I started with Elements 2, and now I’ve got CS2 on my PC where all my hardware (printer, scanner, card reader, etc.) is hooked up. On my MacBook I opted for Photoshop Elements 4 which I use occasionally, and only to get the images from my MacBook to my PC, cropped, slightly adjusted, and ready for the fine tuning I can do in CS2. Photoshop Layers is something I use only on occasion.

I’ve developed my own system, for better or worse, which suffices for what I need. I’ll get faster with Layers over time and eventually I’ll probably use Layers to fix just about everything in my images that need tweaking. But right now I’m so quick using my own twisted techniques that it’s hard to “let go” and do it the way the pros do it. Oh, I still get great results. But if I had to go back through my changes to tweak something I’d be out’a luck. I’d have to start over, IF I still had the original. That’s why Layers are so important.

And speaking of Layers…another cool feature of lynda.com is the ability to fill in the holes in your experience/education right there, on the spot. Say, for instance, I’m going through the Aperture course and they start talking about Layers, which, in my case, may be a sore point with me because I’m still not fluent in that technique.

In that case and since I have unlimited access to any course through my membership, I just access Adobe Photoshop CS2, scroll down the main menu until I come to lessons 13, 14, and 15, which are Layers Essentials, Layer Masks, and Adjustment Layers, inclusively. There lies all the information, in an easy to follow QuickTime movie, one could ask for pertaining to Layers. When I’m ready to get into even more intense study I can go back to lynda’s main menu and under Photoshop CS2 find the heading PS CS2 Channels and Masks. To the right of the Chapters and Headings in the menu you will see the number of hours each subject contains. For instance, under PS CS2 Essential Training there are eleven hours of lecture/movie on that subject. That gives you an idea just how intensive and complete these courses are.

I’d like to offer you a PARTIAL list of some of the courses presently offered by lynda.com. To list them all would be several pages just by themselves. But I’d like to give you an idea how extensive this site is. Take note that there are constant additions and updates to these courses. By the time I’m finished writing this, I wouldn’t doubt that new courses will have been added.

ADOBE: Acrobat, After Effects, Audition, Creative Suite, Bridge, Encore, Illustrator, Photoshop (s) 6, 7, CS, CS2, and Elements, with CS3 being posted in increments starting last week

APPLE: Aperture, Compressor, DVD Studio Pro, Final Cut Pro, Garage Band, iDVD, iMovie, iPhoto, iTunes, iWeb, Mac OS X

COREL: Draw, Painter, Word Perfect

FILEMAKER PRO

GOOGLE: Blogger, Picassa

MACROMEDIA: ActionScript, ColdFusion, Contribute, Director, Dreamweaver, Fireworks, Flash 8,
Flash MX 2004, Flash 5

MAXON: Cinema 4D

MICROSOFT: Access, Excel, FrontPage, Office 2007, Outlook, Publisher, Windows XP, Word

QUARK: Interactive Designer, QuarkXPress

DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPHY

NETWORKING and SECURITY

PODCASTING

WEB DEVELOPMENT

and on and on and on goes the list.

The beauty of lynda.com is that anyone interested in any one of the plethora of subjects taught, whether they be a casual user or professional and anywhere in between, can get all of the information they need right there in the comfort of their own home, at their convenience, and for a price that’s affordable to just about anyone. And yes, you can buy the CDs or DVDs of any of the offerings if you’d like to have a hard copy of the lessons. The disks are priced fairly and competitively.

Why go to the bookstore or buy expensive untried CDs of a subject when, for a modest subscription, one can join lynda.com and try any of these lessons at their convenience. Once you’ve tried lynda.com you will be a fan, just like me. I know of no other way to get so much for so little in this day and age. Take the plunge. Educate yourself, and reap the pleasure for years to come.