This will be my second year attending the Adobe MAX conference. Once again, it will be held virtually, but there are so many interesting and informative sessions that it will be nice to have access to the recordings as well as watching live.

At first, it can appear to be overwhelming with all of the information offered. So, how do you go about choosing your Adobe MAX schedule when there are 10 tracks and more than 350 sessions?

Tiffany Haddish and Adobe’s Paul Trani during Sneaks at Adobe MAX 2018. Photo by Bryan Esler.

Adobe MAX general categories

Once you register you’ll be taken to your dashboard, which is where you’ll see your schedule after you’ve chosen the sessions you want to attend.

From your dashboard, you’ll see the Open Catalog link. This is where you’ll find the session catalog. They’ve made finding sessions on specific topics very easy. You can choose from general categories and narrow it down from there.

  • Type: Choose from Keynote, Lab and/or Session
  • Product: These range from Acrobat to XD
  • Track: Tracks offered in 3D/AR, creativity, education, graphic design and several others.
  • Technical Level: Choose the level of learning you need or are comfortable with
  • Audience: Courses that are geared toward a certain audience and what their roles may be in jobs
  • Category: Here you’ll find How-To, Inspiration, Mobile, Remote Work and a few other categories
  • Day: Choose which day you’re available to attend sessions and only see those sessions

Within each of these categories, you’ll see more choices. If you have specific products, business practices or certain software you want to learn more about you’ll be able to find sessions on those products, too.

I’m excited about a few photography-related courses in particular.

Adobe Principal Worldwide Creative Cloud Evangelist, Terry White is always a good bet for great information. This year he’s teaching the Transforming Images Anywhere with Photoshop session. In this session, you’ll learn how to:

  • Create and edit images on your desktop or mobile device
  • Use powerful selection tools, layer masks and blending modes
  • Sync your images to the cloud
  • Share your finished work from your mobile devices
Terry White at Adobe MAX 2019. Photo by Bryan Esler.

Kristina Sherk, Retoucher and Photoshop educator will be leading a session on Retouching made easier with neural filters in Photoshop. She will demonstrate the powerful Adobe Sensei AI technology and how it can save you time in your retouching.

Photoshop educator, Dave Cross will be helping out those who are still learning Adobe Photoshop by teaching the Introduction to Photoshop session. He will help you gain a solid understanding of Photoshop basics in a lab-like session that you can follow along.

Mat Hayward, Senior Adobe Stock Contributor Evangelist, Adobe will be sharing a case study. This session will explore:

  • How three successful stock artists pivot to incorporate timely events and themes
  • Which stock images sold best — and why
  • Lessons you can apply to your own portfolio as you create images in response to cultural change 

Where to start at Adobe MAX

My suggestion is to start by choosing the Keynote. This will be the first look at the latest and greatest that Adobe has to offer. From there I would check on which day or days you are available to attend, that way you won’t be choosing sessions you can’t watch.

Scott Belsky at Adobe MAX 2018. Photo by Bryan Esler.

Then head to the product section and choose which products you are interested in learning more about. If you’re only interested in a certain aspect and want to choose sessions specific to a particular topic such as photography, social media, graphic design, etc. check out the Track section and sort sessions by which track is relevant to what you want to focus on learning.

If you’re a beginner you may choose to sort your options by the Beginner sessions. Maybe you’re Advanced and want to sort out the beginner courses. It really makes it easy to narrow down and choose what sessions will benefit you the most.

There might be certain speakers presenting that you just don’t want to miss. Under the speaker list, you can search by name, pull up the speaker bio and also find out all the courses that a particular person is presenting and choose your sessions that way.

Organized schedule

After you’ve gone through and selected all the sessions you want to take part in, you can click on Your Schedule and easily see all of the sessions you’ve chosen by day and time. Now you can just sit back, relax and wait for the learning to start.

Note that Adobe MAX registration requires an Adobe ID. You’ll need to register with your primary Creative Cloud account email, or you can create a new Adobe ID when you register.