Letter from Lynda

This month you’ll find training on Office 2013 as well as our first-ever foundational courses on both typography and programming, a new installment of our audio techniques series, and a course on sharing and organizing photos. Plus we have gift memberships of all sizes if you want to share your love of learning with your valentine.

Photo by Bruce Heavin

Get to know Office 2013 and Office 365

Explore the features and interfaces of Microsoft Office 2013 with our new courses. Office 2013 New Features offers an overview of suite-wide enhancements, including touchscreen sensitivity and improved cloud integration, and updates to Excel, Word, PowerPoint, Access, and Outlook. Also check out our 2013 Essential Training courses on Excel, Word, and SharePoint Foundation. Up and Running with Office Web Apps is an excellent introduction to Office 365, the new Microsoft cloud-based subscription service.

Join lynda.com today

Stay up to date with our training library.

We are constantly adding new software training courses and inspirational documentaries to help you reach your creative and career goals.

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Start a complimentary trial of an effective and affordable customized training solution for your school, business, or government agency.

Explore typography

Whether print or screen based, the right typography adds tremendous power to your design and message. In Foundations of Typography, art director, author, and professor Ina Saltz explains the principles of legibility and readability, typographic organization and hierarchy, type compatibility, typographic terminology, and the use of text faces versus display faces. Get additional inspiration by watching our latest short documentary, The Creative Spark: Title Case, Typographic Artisans, about a San Francisco business and workshop dedicated to the art of the letterform.

Master your recordings

On the heels of our popular Audio Recording Techniques course, Bobby Owsinski turns his attention to Audio Mastering Techniques, demonstrating how to produce final master recordings that can be distributed by CD or online. Learn how to bring life and clarity to your final mixes, and ensure that your recordings sound fresh across a broad spectrum of listening environments.

Build and optimize databases

We interact with databases every day, often without even knowing it. In Foundations of Programming: Databases, author Simon Allardice offers a deep dive into the architecture and benefits of modern database management systems. Find out how to confidently build, maintain, and optimize databases of all varieties for your web, desktop, and mobile application projects.

Help them follow their hearts

What does your valentine love: Photography? Animation? Music? If you love someone who loves to learn, then a lynda.com membership could make a great Valentine’s Day surprise. Our gift subscriptions help friends, family members, and sweethearts pursue the craft and accomplish the work that fills their hearts.

Print and share your photos

We helped you organize your photographs with Photoshop Elements 11 Essentials: 01 Importing and Organizing Photos. Now print them or share them online with tips from Photoshop expert Jan Kabili. In Photoshop Elements 11 Essentials: 03 Sharing and Printing Photos, Jan shows how to use Photoshop Elements 11 to share your photos online via email, Facebook, and Flickr. She also covers printing photos from both Windows and Mac OS computers as well as ordering your prints online through Photoshop Elements 11.

Get a $50 discount on PEPCON

Passionate about publishing? Check out 2013 PEPCON: The Print + ePublishing Conference in Austin, Texas, from April 28 to May 1. Focusing on publishing for ebooks, print, interactive documents, and more, the conference offers presentations by the leading page-layout, design, and publishing trainers in the industry, including lynda.com authors David Blatner, Anne-Marie Concepción, Mordy Golding, James Fritz, Mike Rankin, Michael Ninness, and Diane Burns. Friends of lynda.com get a $50 discount off registration by using the discount code LYNDA.

Until next time, happy learning!

—Lynda

Looking for latest releases?

Browse our most recent courses and sign up to receive new release notifications twice a month.

Keep an eye on the site for these and many other new courses coming soon:

Access 2013 Essential Training
Applied Responsive Design
Bruce Heavin: The Thinkable
Building a Windows Store Game Using HTML and JavaScript
Creating Shader Networks in Maya and Mental Ray
Creating Simulations in MassFX and 3ds Max
The Creative Spark: Nick Onken, Travel and Lifestyle Photographer
CSS: Animations
CSS: Formatting Visual Data
CSS: Gradients
Delegation Fundamentals
Developing Android Applications for Amazon Kindle Devices
Excel 2013 Power Shortcuts
HTML5 Projects: Geolocation
HTML5 Projects: Personalized Ads
iBook Author for Teachers: Fundamentals
InDesign Insider Training: Beyond the Essentials
iPad Music Production: Auria
Migrating from AutoCAD to Revit
Mixing a Short Film with Logic Pro
Mograph Techniques: Animating with C4D Effectors
Outlook 2013 Essential Training
Phasing and Design Options in Revit
Photoshop Elements 11 Essentials: 04 Creative Effects and Projects
Photoshop Retouching Techniques: Beauty Portraits
PowerPoint 2013 Essential Training
Screenwriting Fundamentals
Sculptris Essential Training
SharePoint 2013 New Features
Start with a Theme: Video Blogs in WordPress
Up and Running with Amazon Web Services
Up and Running with PhoneGap
Up and Running with Prezi
Using Natural Media Brushes with Illustrator

Updated and revised courses

ASP.NET Essential Training
Bert Monroy: Dreamscapes
iPad Tips and Tricks
jQuery Mobile Essential Training

Tip of the month

Click to visit course page for On Camera: Video Lighting

Setting up a home or office shooting environment from On Camera: Video Lighting for the Web with Rick Allen Lippert

If you’re producing your own videos, creating your environment and preparing your background is just as important as the lighting. The background communicates to your viewer. What it communicates is up to you.

So, what type of background is best: a paper or cloth photographer’s background? Using a plain white wall or green screen? A set or real room?

When using a real room in your house or office, make sure you declutter. Try to make the background as sparse as possible. Also, try to use the largest or longest room, and be sure to step a few feet away from the wall. This gives shadows a place to fall where they won’t be so dominant. The pros do this so that when they zoom in on the subject, the background goes out of focus.

Unless you need windows as a light source, you’ll want to close any curtains, avoid shooting toward a window, and keep windows out of your shot. The light coming through them is usually just too bright to work with.

When choosing a background, keep in mind that a white wall focuses attention on the speaker and works well if you want to place graphics in the shot.

Photographers’ backdrops come in either cloth or paper rolls that hang from a rod and come in a variety of colors and styles. Some are double-sided with chroma key green on one side. A green screen lets you use any background you choose, but if it’s not well lit or you don’t have the right software, you could end up looking like a small-market meteorologist. (See our course Green Screen Techniques for Video and Photography.)

Want more tips on lighting your video shoots? Watch Rick Allen Lippert’s full course, On Camera: Video Lighting for the Web.

Testimonials of the month

Thanks for changing my life
Stuck in a dead-end job, I was very unhappy with my situation. Fortunately, I had recently signed up to lynda.com and completed a few courses in Illustrator. I contacted an employment agency, who said, “We have a great job but do you know how to use Illustrator?” I happily replied yes and now I am employed as an illustrator in what has to be the best job I’ve ever had.
—Owain H.

lynda.com saves the day
I can’t tell you how much I love your website and course offerings. In these days of technology explosions I don’t know how I could ever keep up—and I’m running just as fast as I can now. There have been many late, late nights where I’ve hit some wall with some program and it’s too late to call anyone to answer a question, but then there’s lynda.com to save the day.
—Ed M.