In October 2016 I’ve announced to be working on a course about Photoshop Scripting. Is it ready for release?

According to my original (publicly undisclosed) plans, I would have put it for sale around April 2017. But I haven’t – yet. Why? When? WTF? TL;DR It will take some more months – yes, the unit of measure is “Months”, plural, and perhaps counted on two hands. So don’t hold your breath. But it will be published, and it’ll be worth the wait.

The truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth

I started working on the previous course, on Photoshop HTML Panels Development (book, sample code, and video tutorials), around September 2015 – I put it for sale on March 24th, 2016. Back then, I had to start from scratch in many, if not all, senses. I had to deal with the practical aspects of creating content out of one’s brain juices and trying to turn it into a product that other people may be willing to spend their money on – as a beginner. From book self-publishing tools to e-commerce platforms, down to video production, audio equipment, VAT/MOSS and whatnot.

Each one of them has had its own learning curve – how does Leanpub work? Gumroad integration? Newsletter service? Adobe Audition? Time well spent, but extra time nonetheless. That summed up with the creation of, well, the actual stuff: teaching HTML Panels Development as efficiently as possible. With that in mind, I tried to follow the same idea of my previous course.

Thanks to which – it’s no secret – I have, financially speaking, saved my butt in 2016: for I’m still a freelance with variable incomes, also based on hourly rate jobs, and 2016 has happened to be one bad year. So I started in September 2016 working on the PS Scripting course. Same same but different, could I possibly follow my HTML Panels course schedule this time too?

✔︎ No need to spend time re-learning the platforms and tools, I can use my previous work as a template.

✔︎ I am more experienced in authoring a course now, so perhaps the process will be faster.

✔︎ I may need to save my butt one more time, and if this is not a powerful drive, I don’t know what could be.

✘ Photoshop Scripting, compared to HTML Panels, is a vast topic, a universe of its own. Hence, if the Panels book is 300 pages, I would expect the Scripting book to largely exceed 400.

✘ With one course under my belt, I’d like some aspects of the next one to be a bit fancier. In other words, as an author, I know where there’s room for improvement.

Summing pluses and minuses, I’ve told myself that it could work! But I was wrong, so very wrong.

A couple of positive events hit me – on one side, I’ve found a technical editor who is a smart, talented and experienced developer friend of mine. She gave me a truckload of excellent feedback, which will require for me to put my hands back on the +200 pages of the first part’s first draft.

On the other side – a personal side – after 2.5 years of waiting mainly but not only because of the Italian bureaucracy, my wife and I could finally start the restoring works of our house, a portion of a renewed yet old (let’s say “ancient”) farmhouse that we bought in late 2014. We’ve spent the last full year signing papers, looking at drawings, paying way too many taxes, discussing walls, roofs, plaster, getting mad at carpenters, plumbers, discovering all kind of big and small issues in places and materials we happily ignored the existence of until then. We’re still halfway through it, but with the exception of the sewage, the Big Works should be done – now it’s time to throw the money into the bottomless pit known as “the finishing touches”: insulation, tiles, bathrooms, painting, doors, kitchen and the like.

Believe me – you don’t need to believe me if you’ve ever undergone this kind of “situation”: you just know for the rest of your life – you can’t possibly concentrate having somebody switching on a cement mixer at 8 AM, or hammering something upstairs, or while waiting for the gutter squad. Moreover, while putting on standby this long-term project of mine, I had to work on more mid and short-terms stuff in order to keep sustaining my family and the vampire, aka the house restoration.

I’ve released, among the rest, two major updates of my Photoshop best seller Panels ALCE 3 and Double USM 2. I have new and old ongoing collaborations on other Panels, alongside with my usual routine job on Retouching. So, I failed miserably in trying to follow my old schedule. It just didn’t work for a mix of the above reasons.

What to expect?

I’m still 100% committed to having the PS Scripting course done, but it’s surely going to take many more months. I’m not willing to quantify, mostly because I’m still stuck midstream in the house works, yet I’m slowly getting back to the right mindset – I have to.

I apologize if my initial announce has raised expectations that I’ve not been able to meet yet. What I can tell you is that the content I’ve written so far (7 chapters, +200 pages) is really exciting. I should keep a low profile, but I’m especially proud of the ActionManager section: you won’t find anywhere else about 60 pages that logically cover this topic, from the historical perspective up to the details of Descriptor inspectors and AM Setters. You gonna love it.

So, if you’ll need to wait, it’s going to be worth it – or at least, I’m putting all my energy into making the course worth your time. Thanks for your patience, and keep an eye on this blog for future updates! Cheers from the building site once known as “our house”.