Research Tools and Services Discovery

Visual effects have gone from a secret craft to a well-known career path, and with today's software, and the right tutorials, anyone can make high-quality VFX. The After Effects Compositing Essentials series is designed to help mograph artists of any level master techniques such as matching, tracking, keying, and rotoscoping. This course is your introduction to the series: part tutorial and part inspiration. Mark Christiansen introduces the seven essential compositing techniques and some bonus tips to help enhance drama, correct color, and create transparency. He also explains the art of storytelling with VFX, and how the pros use After Effects to create convincing movie magic.

So you've decided to rotoscope. Performing a "roto," an animated selection with masking and paint tools, is time consuming, but the result can be amazing. In this course, Mark Christiansen teaches you how to roto, and how not to roto, in After Effects. His technique relies on a mostly manual masking and painting process, but he also introduces some procedural tools, such as tracking, to make your job go faster. Learn how to build simple rotos and more advanced articulated rotos, replace missing or mismatched backgrounds, separate foreground action to visual effects, and make the results look more realistic with soft edges and motion blur. Mark also reveals techniques for painting with the Brush and Clone tools and tricks for working with the Roto Brush.

This course highlights some of the most exciting features in the latest release. These include enhanced 3D lights, cameras, and effects; the Warp Stabilizer; new stereoscopic tools; and the simplified audio workflow between Audition and After Effects. The course also includes bonus tips, "Tweaks for Geeks," on working more efficiently in After Effects, including searching, sorting, saving, and more.

After Effects CS5.5 New Creative Techniques was created and produced by Trish and Chris Meyer. We are honored to host their material in the lynda.com Online Training Library®.

After Effects has a powerful toolset, but there are some things Photoshop just excels at. Namely, manipulating raw images, color, and perspective. If you're a Creative Cloud subscriber, you have access to the entire suite of applications. So why not take advantage of both toolsets? In this course, Rich Harrington shows video professionals how to fully integrate Photoshop into a variety of After Effects workflows, including repairing images and building new assets for motion graphics and video effects.

Learn how to properly develop and then optimize raw files to increase performance in After Effects, and use Photoshop's advanced typographic controls. Find out how to use layer styles to add bevels, overlays, and glows, and correct lens distortion, chromatic aberration, and vignetting. Rich also introduces a unique use for Vanishing Point, which allows you to export 3D objects for parallax movements and virtual sets. Plus, discover how to save out depth mattes for backdrops and keying, and use the powerful Content-Aware tools for background plates, set extensions, or recomposing assets. There's a lot to learn! Start watching to incorporate Photoshop's advanced tools into your next After Effects project.

Explore the latest Apple Watch update, watchOS 3. This short course reviews the new features and capabilities of watchOS, including the Dock-based interface, new watch faces, and the SOS feature for emergency calls. Author Nick Brazzi also takes a look at sharing activity and workout data with friends, and explores some of the other bundled apps, including Find My Friends, reminders, and messaging.

Hooks are key components of WordPress plugin development. There are two types: filters modify data and actions perform tasks. Gain a fundamental understanding of how these features work, and learn how to use the built-in action and filter hooks in WordPress to build your own plugins. In the first half of the course, instructor Carrie Dils reviews the plugin API and demonstrates the basics of actions and filters. Already familiar with these core concepts? Skip to chapter three, where she covers what you need to make your own hooks. Learn about load order and writing callback functions, and using third-party hooks. Last but not least, Carrie builds a demo plugin that shows practical real-world uses for actions and filters.

People who have visited your website have already demonstrated an interest in your product or service—even if they haven't made a purchase. By retargeting these visitors with carefully positioned ads, you can exponentially increase your conversion rates. Google refers to this process as remarketing. In this course, marketing consultant Adriaan Brits shows you how to set up an effective remarketing campaign with Google AdWords and Analytics. Discover how to build remarketing lists, link accounts, use remarketing tags, and target custom audiences. Plus, learn about more advanced solutions such as dynamic remarketing and remarketing lists for search ads (RLSA). Along the way, Adriaan introduces you to best practices and tips for optimizing your efforts, increasing ROI, and creating more efficient campaigns.

Looking for a compelling alternative to Adobe Illustrator or CorelDRAW? Affinity Designer is a powerful and affordable vector-design application mixed with pixel-based texture and retouching tools—all in one easy-to-use interface. It was created with the professional-level features that any artist, designer, or illustrator needs to execute high-quality results.

Here Ronnie McBride introduces the workflows and tools required to get up to speed with this fast, powerful, and professional application. He shows how to work with workspaces in Affinity Designer, called personas; use the drawing tools; and create custom brushes. This course is designed to help artists feel more confident and become more proficient using Affinity Designer in their own work.

Learn how to create an animated shower scene for a product visualization inside Adobe After Effects. The complete scene features a chrome showerhead, water streams, steam, and a realistic background—all built in true 3D space with Element 3D, an AE plugin that makes it easy to build 3D objects and particle systems. Explore different shooting angles with the scene camera, and learn to add a depth-of-field camera. Discover how to completely automate the stream speed and thickness in a very natural looking way, all with sliding controllers. Then turn that effect into multiple similar (but not identical) streams, for a realistic shower spray.

This is a project-based learning experience. Each step of the process is rich with object lessons that are applicable to the variations that a motion design and compositing artist will face in the real world.

Learning After Effects? Take your skills to the next dimension: 3D. After Effects CC comes bundled with the 3D application CINEMA 4D Lite and a pipeline to integrate its output directly into the After Effects timeline. In this course for C4D beginners, After Effects expert Chris Meyer shows you how to track and extract the camera move and ground plane from already shot footage, and add a 3D model—complete with lighting and shadows—to the scene. These project-based lessons are a great way to familiarize yourself with C4D motion tracking and layers.

The first course in the series, After Effects Apprentice 17, includes an overview of the C4D Lite user interface, as well as important setup information you need to know whenever you use live C4D layers in After Effects. We recommend you watch it first if you have no prior experience with C4D.

After Effects CC Essential Training covers all of the fundamentals required to get new video editors and mograph artists up to speed with this powerful program. The first two chapters explore the key concepts, terminology, and interface of After Effects, and break down the six foundations of After Effects mastery—compositions, layers, animation, effects, 3D, and rendering. Follow-up chapters introduce a variety of real-world projects designed to reinforce the skills you've learned, such as:

• Building graphics such as lower thirds, logos, and credit rolls
• Repairing and retiming video
• Keying green-screen footage
• Rotoscoping
• Animating a 3D logo
• Motion tracking

Your guide, Ian Robinson, wraps up the course with some project management techniques that will help you merge projects from multiple editors, and get you in the habit of archiving completed work.

Adobe After Effects CC 2018 offers new features that can enhance your VFX and motion graphics workflow. In this course, explore the major new additions to After Effects—including the latest version, 15.1, introduced in April 2018—and discover how to leverage them in your post-production process. Mark Christiansen provides a hands-on look at this update, showing how to edit keyboard shortcuts visually, create nulls from paths, automate motion with data-driven animation, use master properties to animate nested compositions, build smoother deformations with the Advanced Puppet tool, and more. In addition, he explains how to work with immersive video and customize your VR pipeline.

To keep you up-to-date on the latest additions to After Effects CC 2018, Mark will update the course when new features are released.

Learn how to find and translate complex raw data into information you can use to make better decisions, with Access queries. Access expert Adam Wilbert explains how to create real-world queries to filter and sort data and perform calculations, as well as refine query results with built-in functions, all while offering challenges that help you master the material. Find out how to identify top performers, automate repetitive analysis tasks, make queries more flexible with parameter requests, and increase accuracy and consistency in your database using program flow functions. Adam closes with an assortment of useful query tricks. Take the challenges posed along the way to test and practice your new Access skills.

Access databases typically live on your desktop and are shared with a limited number of users over a local network. Microsoft SharePoint integration allows you to share data on the web, but this solution can be complicated for many users. There are several alternatives that you can consider. By leveraging web-friendly data formats—such as a basic HTML table or machine-readable XML, CSV, and JSON data files—or connecting to a hosted Microsoft Azure database, Access users can expand the reach of their data and reports.

In this course, Adam Wilbert shows you how, by exploring options for getting your data out of Microsoft Access, making it easier to share with others. He covers Access data export options, and demonstrates how to modify exported files with a text editor. He also explains how to link Access to an Azure SQL database to provide a cloud storage solution for your Access tables.

Are you doing everything you can to make sure your sites are accessible and easy to use? Learn practical accessibility techniques to ensure your web designs can be viewed and used by everyone. Internationally recognized accessibility expert Derek Featherstone walks through examples of common web interaction flows, and then steps through considerations and tactical strategies for each component, to assure that people with disabilities can easily complete those tasks. Learn the proper use of color, contrast, and motion, and find out how to design keyboard interactions and touch interfaces; incorporate images, sound, and video; design accessible forms; structure content at the tag level; and balance responsive design with accessibility.

Growing companies don't have a long history to guide management decisions. But they can't go on reacting to one crisis after another without a plan. Such companies need to harness the power of budgeting to identify and solve problems on paper before they arise in the real world.

This course covers purchase budgets, production budgets, hiring budgets, overhead budgets, and cash budgets. Professors Jim and Kay Stice help you weigh the impact of strict versus more moderate budgeting on employee morale, and show how budgets pay off in the future, when you can use them to evaluate your business performance.

Managerial accounting helps managers make decisions using an organization's financial data. An understanding of managerial accounting helps you figure out how much a product costs, analyze when your company breaks even, and budget for expenses and future growth. In this course, accounting professors Jim and Kay Stice cover all the fundamentals, including costs and cost behaviors, cost-volume-profit (CVP) relationships, cost flows, standard costing and activity-based costing, and budgeting.

Want to hear more from Jim and Kay? Learn about all three types of accounting—financial, managerial, and income tax—in their Accounting Fundamentals course.

This course demonstrates how to design a form from scratch in Word, Illustrator, or InDesign—or from an existing electronic document. author Claudia McCue teaches how to add interactive fields like check boxes, buttons, drop-down lists, and digital signature fields; how to add field calculations like sum or average; and how to use JavaScript for more advanced calculations. The course also covers how to enable forms for Acrobat Reader users, add security to a form, distribute it via email or the web, and collect data from recipients.

PDF forms are easier to design, distribute, and capture data than either web or print forms. Let Claudia McCue show you just how effortless PDF forms can be, in this Adobe Acrobat course. First, learn how to design a basic form in Word, Illustrator, or InDesign. Then Claudia shows you how to add interactive fields like check boxes, buttons, dropdown lists, and digital signature fields; how to add calculations that can total or average your data; and how to write some simple JavaScript that will unlock more advanced form functionality. Plus, learn how distribute your forms via email and on the web.

HR administration is vital to the success of every business and every employee. Effective HR administrators make sure companies stay compliant with regulations, and keep their employees motivated and engaged. If you are a small business owner who wants a deeper understanding of HR, someone looking for a job in HR, or an administrative professional whose duties include HR, this training course is for you. It provides a general introduction to the role and duties of an HR administrative professional.

HR consultant Catherine Mattice outlines some of the considerations of the human resources professional, such as balancing the needs of employees with the interests of the organization. She reveals how to conduct an HR audit to identify HR practices that need improvement. She then outlines core HR responsibilities: staffing, training, documentation, compensation and benefits, performance reviews, job descriptions, compliance with state and federal regulations, and more.

Adobe Bridge CC is a hard-working component of Creative Cloud that can help you manage photos, preview video and audio files, automate repetitive tasks, and—true to its name—serve as a bridge between your Creative Cloud apps.

In this course, Rich Harrington shares a cookbook of Bridge CC tips and techniques, from culling photos to developing raw files to previewing audio and video. Learn how to review photo sessions with rankings, use stacks to organize media from related sources or shoots, manage the Bridge cache for improved performance, use collections to organize content on multiple hard drives, monetize your work by publishing photos to Adobe Stock, process images with Adobe Camera Raw, save Develop settings for future use, set up HDR and panoramic workflows, preview time-lapse photography and motion graphics, automate PDF and website creation with the add-on Output module, and much more.

Learn the tools and best practices for measuring and correcting color in Adobe Camera Raw. Photographer and teacher Taz Tally shows how to evaluate the color, tone, brightness, and contrast of your photos—by the histogram and by the numbers. Taz shows you how to accurately evaluate and adjust critical highlights and shadows. Then he'll cover correcting skin tones, performing white-balance adjustments, and warming and cooling images. Interested in improving your product photography? Learn how to perform targeted adjustments and correct poor exposure. Taz also shows how to make creative color adjustments to change the mood or add artistic touches. Some challenge videos help you to practice what you've learned along the way.

Localizing your elearning content allows it to be received by a broader audience. You can use Adobe Captivate to create multiple translations and adaptations of your courses to ensure the information is understood in varying contexts. Join Pooja Jaisingh as she demonstrates how to use the localization capabilities of Captivate. She covers the how to create courses with localization in mind, including how to modify metadata, work with variables, use multistate objects, and more. By the end of the course, you should be able to create single-branched courses that are location-aware with conditional behaviors and responses.

Keep up with your digital marketing campaigns, engage with your customers, and maintain your brand using Adobe Experience Manager (AEM). In this course, Kevin Schmidt provides a tour of the AEM interface and shows you step-by-step how to create pages with text, add images, modify properties, manage assets, and publish. He also shares best practices for how to optimize your web content. He helps you quickly grasp the basics of content authoring and asset management so you can get started with AEM.

Adobe XD is a powerful platform for creating user experiences using an iterative design process. In this course, strategic development manager Demian Borba introduces the design tools and workflows in Adobe XD. Learn how to set up an XD project for UX design, use artboards and grids to keep your project organized, and start working with the vector design tools. Find out how to access the official UI kits from Apple, Google, and Microsoft. Then discover how to use power tools like Repeat Grid and symbols with the Assets panel, and leverage assets from other applications as well as Creative Cloud Libraries. By the end of the course, you should have everything you need to know to create your own web and mobile application designs with Adobe XD.