[freshhawk]

Those are of very different types. Where is the practical photoshop retouching course from MIT or Stanford?

Of course there isn't one, because that's not the kind of education they provide.

Where are the superior alternatives for someone to learn how to process HDR images in Photoshop or How to use Rhino to render architectural designs? And they need to learn this by tomorrow.

[alexashka]

Here is what google gave me in 0.31 seconds for photoshop retouching: https://www.google.ca/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&es...

Smashing magazine 70 free resources? Sounds good.

Let's go down the list, HDR images in Photopshop: google gave me https://www.google.ca/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&es...

The first link seems quite in depth and adequate.

Do I need to go on? I'm not trying to be a dick but the first two examples I gave you took less than a minute to find FREE answers for.

Even if you do find some edge case where Lynda happens to have a better solution than what I can gather online within 5 minutes, what does that prove?

Lynda can't match MIT or Stanford, or Apple's developer resources. Instead of pivoting, they're selling what's available freely, for money, to those who are incompetent at using the internet.

That's their business model. If you think that's ok and worth 1.5 billion, great, we simply have a different outlook on life.

[rosser]

No, their business model is (among other things) curated online courses — yes, for money; it is a "business model", after all.

Without looking, I can't say definitively, but I'd bet an appreciable number of the Photoshop tutorials found in your (probably also unverified) LMGTFY-fu are poorly written, inaccurate, inspecific as to which version of Photoshop they're teaching or otherwise suffer from quality control issues — and probably more than one, at that.

I've also never taken an Lynda.com course, myself, so I can't speak directly to the quality of their offerings. A number of former co-workers work there [1], however, and if they're any indicator of the caliber of people the company employs, then they're probably pretty solid.

They're selling a (presumably somewhat reliable) minimum level of quality in the courses they put up, so that people who have better things to do than perform comparative analyses of the free offerings out there [2] can get on with the thing they wanted to do in the first place: learn the material they're interested in learning.

I don't think that's a particularly terrible business model at all — especially if you can also flip it for $1.5b.

[1] Congrats to them, and I hope their options agreement included accelerated vestiture upon acquisition!

[2] A thing that might be rather difficult, given their desire to learn about the subject in the first place. How, exactly, do you know which course or tutorial is worth a damn if you don't know anything about its subject matter? I guess you could pay someone to do it...

Oh, wait.

EDIT: Footnotes instead of parentheticals for legibility.

EDIT 2: Please don't call people whose priorities and skillsets differ from yours "incompetent". It smacks of the kind of elitism I find so disgusting in our industry, and of the myopia I was referring to up-thread: "Well, if I can do this, everyone should be able to!"