Adobe Tutorials

When I began learning HTML and web design, many years ago, I got my hands on a second-hand copy of Photoshop 6 and began scouring the interent and used book stores. Not long after that, I found myself in possession of a copy of Illustrator 9. Needless to say, I didn't have the resources to buy a new copy of the most recent version (Photoshop 7 and Illustrator 10, at the time) or take any kind of classes or lessons.

Which was fine, because I soon found out that the internet is a vast resource of tutorials for Adobe graphics programs, especially Photoshop. Most of the tutorials you can find are great, but a great many of them assume a knowledge of the program that you might not have, or give very vague instructions. There also exist many tutorials that use different methods to achieve the same goal.

Not long after I began my online quest for Photoshop and Illustrator tutorials, I came across an absolute gem of a site: www.thewebmachine.com. The owner of the site was European, but wrote (if not spoke) English quite fluently and was a veritable wealth of information about Adobe products, including the now defunct Go Live and Live Motion. His tutorials were clear, concise and by the numbers, never assuming any kind of prior knowledge of the product. For the next several years, I made an almost daily pilgrimage to this marvelous site, honing my skills in Photoshop, Illustrator and Image Ready.

Alas, the site is no more; it disappeared sometime in late 2006 and there had been no updates to the site since February 2004. However, the archives live on at web.archive.org where, if you don't mind the incredibly long load times and the seemingly random and frustrating absence of key graphics, you can still find those excellent tutorials. Then it occurred to me that not everhyone would be willing to suffer these inconveniences, so I decided to recreate the tutorials here. It won't happen all at once, of course, but it will happen.

I'd really like to thank the person who originally owned The Web Machine website, but I don't know how - he never published his name. So, click on the red menu to the right, and enjoy and learn. All of the original tutorials were for Photoshop 7 and Illustrator 10; I've updated them for CS2.