What I learnt at Leeds Adobe Campus Tour
Adobe has been running round the country doing lots of workshops. Their campus tour is aimed at students and university staff, but I was lucky enough to be invited by a member of staff.
I went to three 45 minute workshops about different Adobe products. The instructor raced through the various useful new features and I tried to keep up with my note taking. I was able to relax in the Dreamweaver session because I knew a lot of it, but I couldn't afford to blink in the Photoshop and Illustrator session.
The instructor made it all look very easy, but now I come to look through my notes I realise it's going to take me a while to learn how to use the things he showed us.
The first thing I've managed to learn and actually do, is to use the Adobe photomerge tool. I've always liked the pictures David Hockney made by joining together lots of Polaroid pictures and I was wondering why I was starting to see lots of examples of people creating similar affects. It turns out they've discovered this Photoshop tool as well.
You can find this tool in all CS versions of Photoshop. It's in File > Automate > Photomerge. It takes a collection of files, automatically positions them so they all join up, blends the joins and also sorts out the perspective. I'm sure you could fool it with a difficult picture, but I'm very impressed. Here is an example I've done of the Corn Exchange that uses 6 photos I took. I would have cropped it, but I've left the edges to give you a better idea of how the joining worked.