NAPP PhotoshopWorld 2004
When silverorange went on a trip to San Francisco last February for Mozilla Developers Day, we happened to be schedule to be in the city for PhotoshopWorld West at the Moscone Center. I opted out not knowing enough about it or if the admission was worth it so instead I became a member of NAPP (a requirement for PhotoshopWorld) and eased my way into knowing more about what PhotoshopWorld had to offer.
Needless to say, when PhotoshopWorld East rolled around I decided to go and make a final judgement on the somewhat pricey membership.
What is PhotoshopWorld?
PhotoshopWorld Conference & Expo is developed especially for NAPP members. This year’s theme is “Photoshop CS: Built for Speed” with the entire conference built around Photoshop productivity, efficiency and profitability. It’s three days of non-stop training.
Who is PhotoshopWorld?
The National Association of Photoshop Professionals (NAPP) is a dynamic trade association and the world’s leading resource for Adobe® Photoshop® training, news, and education. It is led by a world-class team of Photoshop experts, authors, consultants, trainers, and educators whose focus is to ensure that NAPP members are on the cutting edge of Adobe Photoshop techniques and technology. The NAPP is the largest graphics-related association in the world and has members in 107 countries. NAPP
Ok, where to start? For PhotoshopWorlds 6th birthday, a record breaking attendance came to the Orange County Convention Center where it all first started and what better way to celebrate then with bad weather. Unfortunately, the major impact was Hurricane Frances and that took away from much of the conference for many. It seemed everyone was in a panic on their cell phones calling home or trying to make last minute flight changes. Many left early Thursday morning and the conference was eventually cut short with a Friday cancellation.
| Original Schedule | What Actually Happened |
|---|
Tuesday
1:00. Pre-Conference Sessions
Wednesday
9:00. Opening Keynote
10:45. Class 1
12:00. Class 2
1:00. Tech Expo Hall/Help Desk
6:15. Class 3
8:00. Photoshop Party
Thursday
9:30. Class 4
11:00. Class 5
12:00. Tech Expo Hall/Help Desk
2:30. Class 6
4:00. Class 7
5:15. Class 8
7:00. The Art of Digital Photography Discussion
10:00. Midnight Madness
Friday
8:15. Class 9
9:30. Class 10
10:45. Class 11
11:45. Lunch
12:45. Class 12
2:00. Photoshop Wars/Conference Wrap-up
|
Tuesday
1:00. Pre-Conference Sessions
Wednesday
9:00. Opening Keynote
10:45. Class 1
12:00. Class 2
1:00. Tech Expo Hall/Help Desk
6:15. Class 3
8:00. Photoshop Party
Thursday
9:30. Class 4
11:00. Class 5
12:00. Tech Expo Hall/Help Desk
1:15. Class 6
2:30. Class 7
4:00. Class 8
5:15. Class 9
6:30. Class 10
7:00. The Art of Digital Photography Discussion
10:00. Midnight Madness
Friday
Cancelled
|
All was not lost besides the fact I really was looking forward to Photoshop Wars. We did miss 2 classes but to their credit, they do provide workbooks and materials from all classes whether you attend them or not. This workbook with almost 800 pages contained all the information from the 60+ classes available this year at PhotoshopWorld.
Opening Ceremonies/Keynote Highlights
- Speakers Deb Whitman (vice president of product management at Adobe), Julieanne Kost (senior digital imaging evangelist at Adobe) and Scott Rawlings (vice president of marketing at Wacom) demonstrated some of Photoshop CS’s features using Wacom’s new Intuos3 Professional Pen Tablet.
- The 2004 Photoshop Hall of Fame Inductees were awarded to Bert Monroy, Julieanne Kost, and Ben Willmore.
- Felix Nelson, creative director for NAPP presented the first NAPP Pioneer Award to Robb Kerr for his longstanding dedication to Photoshop education. Robb Kerr is one of the original NAPP educators.
- The keynote ended with the Guru Awards given to 11 recipients (PhotoshopWorld attendees) honouring their work in Photoshop.
Some Personal Highlights
- Number #1 Highlight: Talking with Wacom and finding out my Wacom tablet has a hardware failure and they are not as difficult to use as I thought they were. Time to buy the new Intuos tablet knowing how well the tablets really work.
- Finally an understanding on the mystery double space after a period. High School always required this double space to start a new sentence and today it is no longer used. The difference is that typewriters evenly spaced out each letter needing the double space to be noticed. Typography today, each letter has their own required width. I need to break that old habit. It’s proving to be very difficult.
- ”Using Curves and the New Histogram Palette“. Ben Willmore did an amazing job of explaining the details and theory behind this dialog box. Don’t just use it, know what it’s doing.
- Attending classes with Instructor Bert Monroy, a true genius with photo-realistic paintings. It was also good matching faces and personalities to the authors/instructors such as Julieanne Kost, Scott Kelby, Ben Willmore and Katrin Eismann.
Some Very Cool Stuff
- With the use of ImageReady that comes with Photoshop, you can export data from Excel into a Photoshop template creating dozens of images.
- The New 30 inch Apple Display
- Wacom Cintiq 18SX Display. Very impressive and works well from the few minutes I had to play with it.
- Wacom announced the pre-released of the new Intuos 3 tablet (now officially released). Expensive, but still very cool.
- It’s always the little things overlooked that impress the most. If you have multiple layers in your image, you can just hold down CTRL (command) to drag the top most layer under your cursor. You can also hold down shift and click visible layers to link them.
Not So Very Cool Stuff.
- Day 3 was cancelled due to Hurricane Francis causing me to miss the anticipated Photoshop Wars contest. Almost everything else was rescheduled into Thursday.
What I Actually Attended
- Opening Keynote
- Curves and the New Histogram Palette: with Ben Willmore
- Advanced Selection Techniques: with Katrin Eismann
- Color Management and Printing in Photoshop: with Chris Murphy
- Creative Side of Photoshop: with Julieanne Kost
- Copyright & Protect Your Work: With Bert Monroy, Moose Peterson and Jack Reznicki
- Advanced Layers and Blending
- Digital Studio Speed Clinic: Todd Morrison
- The Lost Art of Typography: Scott Kelby
- Professional Retouching Strategies: Katrin Eismann
- The Creative Workflow: Bert Monroy
Odds and Ends
- The Orange Country Convention Center is about 1 mile long, holds 60,000 and can have 20—30 events at one time. Some amazing facts.
- PhotoshopWorld was not all about Mac users. Many Expo displays and Instructors were Windows based.
- Attendees ranged from elementary material for beginners to very advanced topics that were hard to follow. I spent the months leading up to PhotoshopWorld reading up on Photoshop so I wouldn’t walk into a group looking like an idiot. It almost seemed that some just started using the software.
- Where you live in the world greatly impacts ones impression of what is expensive. I heard a few times how inexpensive this piece of hardware was or how cheap this software is compared to what it does. Add the Canadian exchange rate to that, and what the cost of living is like in your area and that inexpensive item now takes over a weeks salary to pay for.
Final Thoughts
I still find the prices expensive and will seriously consider about renewing this January but I do have more of an appreciation for NAPP and what it’s about. Seeing those behind the text and their incredible depth of knowledge with digital art was truly amazing.
I still feel somewhat weird in a community devoted to a single application (plus the many topics that surrounds it) however, it’s much easier to see why so many focus, praise and are in love with Photoshop. I must admit that my own interest for Photoshop has tripled over the past year.
The more you understand what an option does in Photoshop, the more questions it will generate expanding into it’s many other abilities.