Kelby Train­ing Review

Wel­come to my Kelby Train­ing review! I started using Kelby Train­ing in March, 2008 and have main­tained an Annual sub­scrip­tion. Why? It’s the most valu­able train­ing resource I’ve found. Kelby Train­ing main­tains a large library of courses with new updates every week. My ini­tial rea­son to join was to under­stand how to use Adobe Pho­to­shop. The pro­gram seemed intim­i­dat­ing to me. I bought Pho­to­shop eight months ear­lier and hadn’t even used it. I knew that Pho­to­shop was a key fac­tor in cre­at­ing beau­ti­ful pho­tographs, but I had no idea where to begin with it.

Click here to check out the train­ing site.

There were plenty of books on the mar­ket, but I felt as if I would bet­ter learn the soft­ware if I could see some­one use it. Since I didn’t have any friends who knew how to use Pho­to­shop, I searched until I found Kelby Train­ing.

The site imme­di­ately impressed me by pro­vid­ing the first lessons of each course for free. That helped alle­vi­ate my con­cerns, since I could see the high qual­ity of the video and get an idea about the pre­sen­ta­tion of the instructors.

Another aspect I liked was that all of the courses were avail­able. I didn’t have to pay for them piece­meal. Kel­by­Train­ing doesn’t force you to sign up for a long com­mit­ment, either.

• The first lessons in a course are free.
• You can pay a rea­son­able fee for a month and have access to everything
• You can sub­scribe for a year and save money com­pared to renew­ing monthly

My ini­tial thought was that I didn’t need to sign up for a year. I just wanted to learn Pho­to­shop and then go on my merry way. Two great things hap­pened dur­ing that month, though.

1. I learned how to use Pho­to­shop with­out freak­ing out
2. I watched other courses and learned more than I expected

It didn’t take long for me to get hooked. There was more con­tent than I could watch in a week and Kelby Train­ing kept adding new courses every week. So, I sub­scribed for another month to catch-​up, and then I was going to be done. Except, they kept adding more courses that I just had to watch. That’s been going on for four years now. It’s insid­i­ous! Even­tu­ally, I real­ized that this was a great ser­vice and I sub­scribed annually…and they’re still adding more courses that I just have to watch!

Kelby Train­ing Pro­vides Easy Access to Online Training

Kelby Train­ing has four major components.

1. Online Train­ing
2. Live Sem­i­nars
3. Books
4. DVDs

Let’s look at the Online Train­ing for the bulk of infor­ma­tion. The first thing you notice is an attrac­tive user inter­face show­ing how to get to the con­tent. There’s also the remark­able 100% money back guar­an­tee promi­nently dis­played on the screen. Not only can you try before you buy, but they will refund your money if you aren’t sat­is­fied with the train­ing (unlikely, in my opin­ion). That’s a good way to build trust.

Once inside, you notice a very clean user inter­face. Across the top are sim­ple and effec­tive options for search. Your search options appear across the top. The cen­ter shows three columns of avail­able train­ing to pro­vide quick access to new courses, your favorite courses, or your most recently viewed courses. While it’s great to see the new con­tent promi­nently dis­played, I par­tic­u­larly like the recent his­tory col­umn. It’s rare that I watch an entire course in one sit­ting, so it’s nice to have an auto­matic book­mark to get me right back to the les­son I last viewed.

Hover your mouse over the Cat­e­gories or Instruc­tors menu to see a drop down list filled with choices.

New releases are promi­nently dis­played on the left. Any lessons you marked as a Favorite are in the cen­ter, and your most recent lessons are on the right.

The Cat­e­gories are bro­ken down into three groups:

1. Pho­to­shop
2. Pho­tog­ra­phy
3. Cre­ative and Web

Click on the image to see a larger view and you’ll notice there’s quite a bit of con­tent. Keep in mind that each item on that list has mul­ti­ple courses behind it.

Also, look at some of the names on the list of instruc­tors. Kelby Train­ing has its own staff of excel­lent train­ers, but they also work with pro­fes­sion­als in the indus­try who share decades of expe­ri­ence with you. You aren’t watch­ing videos from week­end war­riors. These are peo­ple who are work­ing pro­fes­sion­als in the field. They aren’t just shar­ing the tech­ni­cal aspects of the course mate­r­ial. They’re also shar­ing their insight, ideas and expe­ri­ence that makes them suc­cess­ful. You’ll learn how they approach things cre­atively as well as technically.

Using the Kelby Train­ing Video Player

Courses are bro­ken into lessons, which are dis­played on the left side. The video player is sim­ple to use with com­mon con­trols, includ­ing the abil­ity to use a full-​screen dis­play. Under the video are options to mark the les­son as a Favorite, and also down­load any course mate­ri­als that may be avail­able. The video qual­ity is excel­lent and streams seam­lessly. You can’t down­load the lessons, so you must have an Inter­net con­nec­tion to view the material.

The Kelby Train­ing iPad App

Kelby Train­ing also has a free iPad app that lets you watch courses as long as you have an Inter­net con­nec­tion. The user inter­face is clean and easy to nav­i­gate. The left side ini­tially shows Cat­e­gories of courses. If you look at the bot­tom of the left side, you’ll see options to browse by Instruc­tor, your favorites, or a search for con­tent. You have all the same ser­vices to watch courses on your iPad as you do in the web ver­sion, includ­ing full-​screen video.

The iPad app has an addi­tional fea­ture that the web inter­face lacks, though. If you have an Apple TV, you can use Air­Play to watch your courses on your TV. Per­son­ally, that was my favorite rea­son for using the iPad app. Instead of sit­ting at my desk watch­ing train­ing on a com­puter screen, I can go into my liv­ing room and watch on a 50″ plasma while plopped on a com­fort­able leather sofa. Now that’s education!

Kelby Train­ing Live Seminars

I get the bulk of my train­ing online, but Kelby Train­ing also offers live sem­i­nars that tour the coun­try and some­times other parts of the world. The most recent tour I vis­ited was Scott Kelby’s Light It, Shoot It, Retouch It (LSR) tour in Orlando. Just as the title says, Scott takes his audi­ence through dif­fer­ent photo-​shoot sce­nar­ios to see how he sets up the light­ing, go through an actual pho­to­shoot on stage, and com­plete the results in Pho­to­shop. I was amazed that he could go through five dif­fer­ent sce­nar­ios in the day with­out rush­ing, but every­thing flowed well with plenty of time for breaks.

The LSR tour had one dif­fer­ent aspect of it that I haven’t seen before. Scott taught a very small hands-​on work­shop in the Tampa area and I was able to attend.

The great part of the smaller work­shop was being able to prac­tice the lessons right away, and also to be a bit more inter­ac­tive with Scott than is pos­si­ble at a 400+ per­son sem­i­nar. A week after this work­shop, I went to the Orlando stop of the sem­i­nar tour (since I signed up for that one first). Get­ting a chance to see this same mate­r­ial pre­sented in two dif­fer­ent forms gave me a bit of insight. Here’s what I noticed:

• Scott is very con­sis­tent. Every­thing taught in the work­shop was pre­sented in the sem­i­nar, right down to the jokes.
• You can still get your ques­tions answered at the sem­i­nar. Dur­ing the breaks, Scott (or who­ever is pre­sent­ing the sem­i­nar) invites peo­ple up to answer ques­tions one-​on-​one.
• The sem­i­nars are also a social event. I found plenty of local pho­tog­ra­phers that I knew attend­ing and met some new folks, also.
• Ven­dors also attend the sem­i­nars, so you have a chance to check out some new good­ies or ask ques­tions of them. Dur­ing the lunch break, ven­dors may give a ses­sion on stage.
• It’s amaz­ing how much you can learn in a day. Scott did a fan­tas­tic job of teach­ing stu­dio light­ing and por­trait retouch­ing on his tour. I’ve been to past sem­i­nars (such as Down & Dirty Tricks) and felt the same when I walked out. You get a work­book cov­er­ing the mate­r­ial so you don’t have to furi­ously scrib­ble notes all day.
• The time flies. Scott is an excel­lent pub­lic speaker, but so are the other pre­sen­ters of the tour. Although I haven’t seen every tour, I have watched the same pre­sen­ters on Kelby Train­ing Online and in per­son at Pho­to­shop World. These folks know their mate­r­ial and deliver it in a friendly manner.

What about results? Did I learn some­thing from the work­shop and sem­i­nar that I could put to use later? I’ll let you decide. The first photo below is of Lau­ren, one of the mod­els in Scott’s workshop.

The next shot is of a local model using the light­ing tech­niques from Scott’s LSR work­shop, as well as most of the re-​touching. I made the image below a bit more high-​contrast than the one above, but I have this habit of push­ing things a step beyond where I should stop.

The lessons from the LSR tour were easy to under­stand and imple­ment after I got home. That’s more than I can say for a great deal of train­ing I’ve had in the past. Tell me if this sounds famil­iar. You’re in a course watch­ing the instruc­tor and you’re blown away by what you see. “Man, that looks great!” Then you get home and dis­cover you can’t do the same thing. Maybe the instruc­tor left out a key piece of infor­ma­tion inad­ver­tently, per­haps assum­ing you already knew it or had a tool to make it work. Then you feel totally deflated.

That doesn’t hap­pen with Kelby Train­ing. They show you every­thing and write it down in a work­book. If you don’t have stu­dio lights, they show you how to achieve the same thing with small flash. When you walk out, you know you can do the things that you just saw on stage.

What I like About Kelby Training

Since you can see I’ve been a sub­scriber for sev­eral years, there’s no ques­tion that I like the ser­vice. Here’s a bit more on what I like and why I like it.

• Excel­lent pre­sen­ta­tion — The train­ers know their mate­r­ial very well and they’re good pre­sen­ters. You won’t hear them mum­bling through their pre­sen­ta­tions, say­ing “umm” every few min­utes or engag­ing in sloppy pre­sen­ta­tion. What you get are knowl­edge­able train­ers who show you how to do some­thing while simul­ta­ne­ously speak­ing to you as some­one you know & trust. It’s like hav­ing a buddy show you some­thing. You can con­cen­trate on learn­ing because you aren’t dis­tracted with poor presentation.
• It’s not hard — I started with Scott Kelby’s intro­duc­tory class on using Pho­to­shop and real­ized that I could do it. All of the things that intim­i­dated me about the pro­gram no longer mat­tered. That encour­aged me to check out more courses and I real­ized that none of this is dif­fi­cult. It may take prac­tice or rep­e­ti­tion to mas­ter the tech­niques, but it’s within reach of any­one. They do it. I can do it. You can do it, too.
• Lit­tle moves, big results — Whether you’re train­ing on Pho­to­shop or Stu­dio Light­ing, it quickly becomes appar­ent that the key to suc­cess is this — take small steps to tweak and adjust. If you swing for the fences, you just keep miss­ing your tar­get. Mov­ing a light just an inch or two may have a dra­matic result, where mov­ing it a foot may have a tragic result. The same could be true of using the Liquify fil­ter in Pho­to­shop. Small moves work bet­ter than big ones.
• Con­tin­uos improve­ment — Kelby Train­ing is always look­ing out to ensure they’re giv­ing the best pre­sen­ta­tion and courses to their mem­bers. The list of classes grows each week, but they also revamp the site to take advan­tage of new tech­nolo­gies. When the iPad app came out, they had to re-​encode all of their video to make it com­pat­i­ble. That’s a huge effort, and they did it to sup­port a free app. There was no imme­di­ate pay­off or charge to cus­tomers. The folks at Kelby Train­ing real­ized it would be a good thing for their cus­tomers and made it happen.
• I’m bet­ter off with it than with­out it — I’ve real­ized that knowl­edge is the most valu­able tool I can have as a pho­tog­ra­pher. When I started, I thought that I had to buy bet­ter gear to get bet­ter pic­tures. It doesn’t really work that way most of the time. The best gear is use­less if you don’t under­stand how to use it well, and that knowl­edge means you can also do very well with less than ideal tools. As RC likes to say, “It’s the Indian, not the arrows.” That knowl­edge con­tin­ues beyond my pho­tog­ra­phy and into other cre­ative aspects of post-​processing, web devel­op­ment, and design.

What I’d Like To See Kelby Train­ing Change

Although I’m quite pleased with the train­ing, I want more. By that, I don’t mean there is a spe­cific course that I want to see. They quite often sur­prise me by intro­duc­ing new courses that I didn’t even know I needed, until I saw it. How­ever, there is some­thing I want and I sus­pect oth­ers would have a sim­i­lar interest.

I want to see more foun­da­tion courses for begin­ners in a field. They have some, as you can see “Begin­ner” in the Pho­tog­ra­phy cat­e­gory. I don’t see that in the Cre­ative & Web or Pho­to­shop lists, though. In my case, I would par­tic­u­larly like intro­duc­tory courses in design top­ics to bet­ter under­stand lay­out, color, or type­face deci­sions. Many of the courses at Kelby Train­ing are prod­uct or devices spe­cific, so where do con­cep­tual top­ics fit? Per­haps they need a new top level category.

A course on InDe­sign or DreamWeaver doesn’t help me if I don’t under­stand the first thing about the prob­lems they solve. I want to know how to make a beau­ti­ful poster or web page. I know tools like InDe­sign or DreamWeaver can assist in that process. Unfor­tu­nately, I don’t know the process or deci­sions to make and the prod­uct course is not the place for me to start. Like­wise, a designer may find great infor­ma­tion in courses on those prod­ucts, but there’s noth­ing that gives a fun­da­men­tal pho­tog­ra­phy course on exposure.

Learn­ing is much eas­ier when you start at the begin­ning. I could start from scratch with Pho­to­shop, but I already had an idea of what I wanted to accom­plish and I just needed to under­stand the tool. With design, I don’t have that base of knowl­edge to start before I can truly grasp some of the tool train­ing avail­able. Kelby Train­ing could effec­tively pro­vide these foun­da­tion courses which would lead to greater demand for their inter­me­di­ate and advanced courses.

The good news is that I’m start­ing to see these courses enter the cat­a­log. Scott Kelby recently released a course on pho­to­graphic com­po­si­tion. Then two more courses on com­po­si­tion fol­lowed with David Ziser & Rick Sam­mon. The Light It, Shoot It, Retouch It courses are pro­vid­ing foun­da­tion light­ing lessons for pho­tog­ra­phers. This is a grow­ing trend.

Knowl­edge is the Most Impor­tant Tool

With­out a doubt, Kelby Train­ing is the most valu­able invest­ment I’ve made in pho­tog­ra­phy. Mov­ing up from a Nikon D70 to D200, and then to a D700 didn’t have a dra­matic impact on my pho­tos. Switch­ing from the kit lens to Nikon’s trin­ity of pro­fes­sional zoom lenses didn’t improve my com­po­si­tion or expo­sure. The thing that helped me the most was get­ting the knowl­edge to use those tools. Don’t get me wrong, I love my D700 and fast glass. They’re great tools and have more capa­bil­ity than my pre­vi­ous gear selec­tion. It’s just that those improve­ments meant noth­ing with­out an edu­ca­tion to let me develop the cre­ative vision in my mind.

Kelby Train­ing has a wealth of mate­r­ial and every online course is avail­able while your sub­scrip­tion is active. You could start with a monthly sub­scrip­tion and check it out, like I did, but I think that would be a mis­take. You can look at the list of courses for free. There’s also a 100% money-​back guar­an­tee if you decide it’s not for you. That money-​back guar­an­tee is why I rec­om­mend the annual sub­scrip­tion. You have no risk if you don’t like it, and it will save you money in the long run if you decide that you like Kelby Train­ing as much as I do.

Thanks for check­ing out my Kelby Train­ing review. Click here to visit the Kelby Train­ing web site.