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I’m back from an amazing week in Orlando, and I just had a blast! Here’s quick recap:

  • I’m happy to report that the crutches didn’t slow me down at all—especially since they arranged for me to have a little powered scooter to get me around the convention center. It was pretty quick too, and I was reprimanded several times for doing donuts and zig-zagging through the halls.
  • We had two video crews going non-stop during the event, and we’re putting together a special “Taste of Photoshop World” online training class for KelbyTraining.com, with training segments from a number of different sessions, and highlights from some of the events. But here’s the cool thing: all NAPP members will get a special code so they can take the class for free! (not just members who attended Photoshop World—all NAPP members around the world). I’ll let you know as soon as the class is ready (and the code will be posted on the member’s Web site).
  • It was great meeting so many NAPP members, and a lot of folks who read this blog came up to say hi, too. There was a real electricity in the air the whole week, and people were stopping me left and right to tell me they thought this was the best Photoshop World ever. This really means a lot to me, because we’re always trying to tweak, enhance and improve the learning experience, and the social and community aspects of Photoshop World as well.
  • I taught three classes (Typography and Designing With Type, Photoshop Down & Dirty Tricks, and my Photoshop Seven-Point System). I also did a special bonus session on the expo floor (in the Peachpit/KelbyTraining theater) on how to get that gritty “Dave Hill” style effect. Since how you light your subject is such an important part of getting “the look,” I taped a special video of my live shoot (created exclusively for people who came to my bonus session), where I put the lighting set-up together from scratch, step-by-step, so they could see how to get the same look themselves.
  • For the first time, we had live-blogging from the event, and if you haven’t checked out J-Bon’s (Jennifer Bontempi) photos and show coverage, here’s the link to see what you missed.
  • One of our attendees (from Kaufman/Kramer productions) already posted some photos and comments from the show on his blog (make sure you scroll down and look at some of this own photography—this guy is pretty good), here’s the link.
  • We also posted some official show photos (taken by photographers Brad Moore and Josh Bradley), to the Photoshop World site (here’s that link).
  • Corey Barker did a Photoshop CS3 in Motion class that had a lot of people talking during the conference, and Laurie Excell’s pre-con workshop on learning how to use a digital SLR got lots of love, too! Vincent Versace pulled a rabbit out of his hat, with a session that turned the entire audience into beta testers for a new plug-in from NikSoftware that was announced in his session. They all left with copies of the plug-in to test and report back to Nik, plus he gave out so many goodies, that everybody who didn’t make the session sure wish they had.
  • Microsoft had a show floor theater that was absolutely packing them in with presentations from a lot of big-name photographers and instructors, and Nikon’s theater was also jumping with people with Joe McNally doing location lighting sessions.
  • Dan Margulis introduced two new advanced classes called “5-minutes to a picture postcard” using some amazing new techniques he’s developed, and a lot of people were talking about that.
  • The Lightroom Track was packed (as you might expect), and of course, Adobe’s announcement during the keynote of Lightroom 2.0 Public Beta started the show off with a bang. (I’ll have a post tomorrow on my thoughts on Lightroom 2.0, here on the blog). Also, Adobe had demo sessions on Lightroom 2.0’s new features, along with lots of other cool Adobe stuff.
  • The video track was standing room only, and we’re looking at ways to expand the video training for the next conference.
  • Matt Kloskowski’s Layer Essentials workshop was a huge hit, and it seemed like every other attendee was carrying a copy of his new Layers book.
  • This was the first time we had the Expo open all three days, and it stayed pretty well packed, so I imagine we’ll do it again in Vegas. We also had lot of new vendors exhibiting at the show, and some new product announcements as well, and between that and the four training theaters running the whole time, things were really buzzin’. We also had a lot of photography-related vendors there his time, and you could spot a softbox or umbrella in any direction you looked.
  • We taped an episode of Photoshop User TV in front of a live audience, and it was the usual fun, chaotic, and crazy experience it usually is, but we wouldn’t change it for anything. We tossed out literally box-fulls of Photoshop User TV t-shirts to the crowd, and you could hear the cheering a mile away. The episode will air in two weeks (because of the requirement from Fox Business Network that we have our shows turned in two weeks ahead of schedule).
  • Moose Peterson and Joe McNally wow’d the crowd with slideshows of their amazing work during the closing ceremony, and Dan Margulis and Deke McClelland gave the crowd a look at some of their techniques, and it really closed the show on a big high note.
  • All in all, it was just an amazingly wonderful week. This was our biggest Florida-based Photoshop World ever, with our largest Expo yet, and we had more classes, more instructors, more new stuff, and just more fun than ever!

Our next stop is our West-Coast Photoshop World coming up in September in Las Vegas at the Mandalay Bay Resort & Casino’s convention center, and if you didn’t make it to Orlando, I hope to see you in Vegas. :)