Using lynda.com

Last year I began using Lightroom 4 and Photoshop CS6 for processing my photographs.  I also started shooting in raw, as that gives me the best chance to recover data should I make an error while snapping the photo (such as too light, too dark or too red).

My favorite boy toy does one-on-one instruction in Lightroom and CS6 and has been happy to answer questions and give me tutorials.  However, his time is limited and since we use the software differently, he can’t always help me out.

He did, however, turn me on to lynda.com for on-line tutorials.  Lynda has been doing this for a long time (back before streaming videos was popular, I bought DVD’s from her for Photoshop Elements 2 – a looong time ago).  Lynda has multiple courses for photography, photography software, Microsoft office, web design, and many other things.

For $25 a month, I can take unlimited courses.  The Lightroom Development module was 18 hours long; the module for Lightroom Organizer is 6 hours.  By comparison, a popular author has a daylong seminar coming up here in town.  For $100, he gives five hours of training – one hour for each module in Lightroom.  That’s one hour for Development, one hour for Organizer, etc.  That’s four months worth of training in lynda.com, where I get many more hours for each module.

I can also queue up modules as I find things of interest.  In my queue are courses on using my Canon Rebel 3Ti, HTML essentials (for coding my blog), using pivot tables in Excel, Pinterest tips, and various Photoshop classes.

Best yet?  You can try lynda.com for 30 days to see if you like it.  The price is reasonable, the classes are extensive (and taught by a number of industry experts), and like a library, you can do as much or as little as you like.

Check it out!