Letter from Lynda | Welcome to our November 2011 newsletter! This month, we have a trio of photography courses that will help you create a one-of-a-kind gift for those on your holiday list: a personally crafted, created, and curated photo book. We also focus on using Excel for analyzing and organizing data, and introduce courses on web form best practices, building custom apps, and much more. | Create photo books as holiday gifts—plus an exclusive discount from Blurb for lynda.com members |  As the holidays approach, here’s an idea for a one-of-a-kind gift: a book containing photos of family and friends. The Blurb publishing service makes it possible, and it’s the subject of our new course, Creating Photo Books with Blurb, with Jan Kabili. This course presents three separate workflows for creating and publishing books that showcase photographs using the Blurb self-publishing service. | |  If you’d like to include old family photos in those books, we have two more new courses to help. Start by getting those treasures into digital form with Scanning Techniques for Photography, Art, and Design, with Taz Tally. The course is a review of scanning techniques for graphics professionals and photographers, delving into workflow considerations and the advanced image-quality controls available in most scanning software. | |  Make images look better than ever with Photo Restoration with Photoshop, with professional photo restorer Janine Smith. Janine describes how to evaluate scanned images for imperfections and addresses common problems and their fixes, starting with the basics (fading, spots, and paper texture) and continuing with more complex challenges (rips, adhesive tape, ink marks, and mold). | | Whether your Blurb book contains new photos or old ones, you can save 20% on your Blurb order by using the code LYNDA22 on checkout. The code expires on November 30, 2011,* so start working on those personal gifts now! | | *Offer expires November 30, 2011, at 11:59 PM PST. Enter promo code LYNDA22 at checkout. A 20% discount will be applied toward your order at checkout (maximum discount is USD $200.00, GBP £100.00, EUR €160,00, CAD $210.00, or AUD $180.00 off product totals). This offer is good for one-time use. It cannot be combined with other promotional codes, volume discounts, or gift cards, or be used for adjustments on previous orders. | | | | | Stay up to date with access to the Online Training Library®! We are constantly adding new software training courses and inspirational documentaries to help you reach your creative and career goals. 
| | | | Best practices in web form design | We’ve all had the experience of encountering a form that was so unintuitive or time consuming to fill out that we gave up, figuring we could find the knowledge or product we were looking for elsewhere. We’re excited to welcome acclaimed digital product designer Luke Wroblewski (aka LukeW), who joins the lynda.com author team this month with a course designed to show you how to save your customers and your community from this frustration. | |  In Web Form Design Best Practices, Luke shows how to create web forms that encourage visitors to enter information and covers ways to capture input without the use of forms. The course also covers boosting conversion rates and customer satisfaction, organizing the structure of forms, aligning and grouping form elements, assigning the correct input field types, validating input, and handling data entry errors. | Choose your method for mobile development | We’ve released two new courses for developers that take very different approaches to creating mobile applications. | |  For web developers who want to build native apps, Joseph Lowery’s Building Android and iOS Apps with Dreamweaver CS5.5 shows how to combine HTML, CSS, and other web technologies with PhoneGap, a free software package that was recently acquired by Adobe and is fully integrated with Dreamweaver CS5.5. The resulting applications feel like the web, but behave like real apps, and can be distributed through both the iOS App Store and the Android Market. | |  For developers who’ve learned a bit of Objective-C, Todd Perkins’ new course, Building and Monetizing Game Apps for iOS, describes how to build native game apps for the iPhone and iPad. You’ll see how Todd built Mole It !, an app you can download for free from the iOS App Store. The also course details how to build the app, and how to integrate advertising to generate revenue from applications you give away. | Maximizing Excel | Two new courses by lynda.com veteran Dennis Taylor released this month show how to take full advantage of the database capabilities of Excel. | |  Setting Up a Database in Excel shows what you can and can’t do in Excel and how to get your Excel database set up right. The course begins by explaining the limits of Excel as a data management tool, and spells out the design considerations for creating an effective database. It shows how the table feature can be used to simplify database creation, as well as how to use form and data validation tools to control the data that goes into your database. | |  Managing and Analyzing Data in Excel shows how to maximize the data analysis capabilities of Excel by covering the powerful and easy-to-use database commands and methods critical to anyone who maintains an Excel database. Dennis explains and demonstrates sorting, adding subtotals, auto-filtering, when to use the Excel Advanced Filter, as well as how to use specialized database functions. | | Until next month, happy learning!
—Lynda | |
 Keep an eye on the site for these and many other helpful new courses coming to the Online Training Library® soon: - Cleaning up Your Excel Data
- Virtual Instruments in Logic Pro
- Photoshop Masking and Compositing: Fundamentals
- PostgreSQL 9 with PHP Essential Training
- Effective Email Marketing Strategies
- Creating HTML Email and Newsletters
- Audio Mixing Bootcamp
- Up and Running with Squarespace
- Foundations of Audio: Compressors and Dynamics
- PayPal Essential Training
- Using Regular Expressions
- Virtual Instruments in Pro Tools
- Photoshop Masking and Compositing: Advanced Blending
- Create Your First Online Store with Drupal Commerce
- FrameMaker 10 Essential Training
- Shooting with the Canon Rebel T3i (600D and Kiss X5)
- Shooting with the Nikon D5100
- SharePoint Designer 2010: Branding SharePoint Sites
- WebMatrix with ASP.NET Essential Training
- Create an Animated Bar Chart with jQuery
- CSS: Core Concepts
- QuickBooks Pro 2012 Essential Training
- After Effects Apprentice 12: Tracking and Keying
- Infographics: Planning and Wireframing
- InDesign Styles in Depth
- iOS 5 SDK New Features
| Testimonials of the month Instructors are fantastic
I put off joining lynda.com because I figured that I could find the same stuff on the web for free (boy, am I an idiot). I’ve watched quite a few movies since I signed up the other day and WOW, this is NOTHING like the “tutorials,” videos, etc. stuff on the web. The instructors are absolutely fantastic. I feel like I’m back in school—with instructors I can UNDERSTAND, who certainly appear knowledgeable. The quality of the videos is absolutely top-notch as well. Right now, my biggest problem is figuring out what I want to watch next. You’ve got a great site and I can’t wait to watch my next movie, so ... so long, I’ve got work to do!
—John O.
Each year gets better
Oh my goodness. I have loved lynda.com for several years, and each year gets better. I keep thinking that one day I won’t need this training anymore, and then... I ask for courses like Modo, and in no time you have the course, taught by a pro—and now all the After Effects courses with Chris and Trish. I could go on and on about all the courses I’ve taken and the ones I am planning to take. Wow! It just keeps getting better and better. I hate the fact that I will never be able to quit. I am now a lynda.com addict. :-)
—Sharon W. Read more great feedback. | Tip of the month |  With just a few clicks in Photoshop, many details can be quickly restored to old photographs. | | Fixing a faded black-and-white photo from Photo Restoration with Photoshop Have you ever gone through a box of old photographs, and lamented how many of your pictures have faded over time? Fading is one of the most common types of damage to old photographs, and can be intimidating to fix, especially when the fading is very pronounced. However, faded photos can often be restored with just a few clicks in Photoshop. Sometimes the most intimidating-looking damage is really easy to fix, especially in the case of faded photos. In many instances, all the information is still there in the image, it’s just lighter than it originally was. And if the information is still there, there are ways to bring it back out again. One good way to bring a faded photo back is by using Curves. With your faded photo open in Photoshop, select the Layers panel, and click on the half black, half white circle at the bottom of the panel (Create a new fill or adjustment layer). Select Curves from the list. Next, select the black Eyedropper tool (the uppermost of the three Eyedroppers), and then click on the darkest part of your image. This will set the black point, and with this one click, depending on how faded your picture is, you should see a drastic change. Next, set the white point by selecting the white Eyedropper, and clicking on the lightest portion of your image. You can always use the border of the image, but it’s better to find a point inside of the actual photo. Once you’ve brought some detail back to your faded image, you can fine-tune the restoration in a number of ways: Use the gray point Eyedropper to adjust the midrange details. If the adjustments are too pronounced, you can adjust the opacity in the Layer panel. You can also manually adjust the curve and the sliders in the histogram to lighten or darken your image. View sample movies from Photo Restoration with Photoshop. | |
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