A mere three weeks ago—seriously? has it been that long?—I joined a few dozen of my fellow self-appointed experts for the largest gathering of Photoshop users on the planet: Photoshop World 2010 in Las Vegas, Nevada. At that event, I presented three all-new sessions on the topics of Photoshop CS5, the pen tool, and Camera Raw 6.

At that event, I distributed more than a thousand black-and-white notes that my illustrious sidekick, Colleen Wheeler, printed out for the attendees. But black-and-white goes only so far. Which is why I include the notes for all three sessions as full-color PDF documents that you can download from this post. The notes are altogether free to members of dekeOnline.

Here are the notes for the sessions, in the order that I presented them at Photoshop World. (To download a set of notes, right-click a bold link below and choose Save Link As or the like.)

• Wednesday, September 1: The Top 5 Features in Photoshop CS5. Many of you already saw these features in my Photoshop CS5 Top 5 video blog, which began with The Common Sense Enhancements. (For all five videos, check out the dekePod section of this site.) I even played a video that shows me painting Colleen’s face in 90 seconds.
• Thursday, September 2: Mastering the Pen Tool. Based on the positive response to my 2009 video blog, Photoshop Top 40, Feature #32: The Pen Tool, I decided to present a session on that one tool that lets you select anything in Photoshop, the pen tool. The result was a standing-room-only crowd, and a fun set of notes to boot.
• Friday, September 3: The Unmitigated Power of Camera Raw. Photoshop is HUGE. As if to boast its confidence, it ships with another Very Big program that—while it may not be HUGE—is so vast, well-organized, and powerful that it sometimes eclipses Photoshop itself. It’s called Camera Raw. If you’ve never heard of it, download these notes and learn what and why. If you have, do the same.

I believe I’ll be presenting these same three sessions in Orlando in early April, 2011. (Don’t be put off by the fact that I’m not one of their featured presenters. They go in order of hot, foxy, and best-looking.) In the meantime, enjoy the notes!