Photoshop Essentials.com - Tutorials and training for Adobe Photoshop.
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Photoshop Essentials.com Privacy Policy

Updated May 23, 2018.

Thank you for visiting Photoshop Essentials.com. Your privacy is very important to us. To better protect your privacy, we provide this Privacy Policy which explains our online information practices, including which services we use, what types of personal information we receive and collect when you visit Photoshop Essentials.com, and how we safeguard your information.

By continuing to use Photoshop Essentials.com, you agree to this Privacy Policy. If you have any concern about providing information to us or having such information used in any manner permitted in this Privacy Policy, you should not visit our website or otherwise use our Services.

Update: Our Privacy Policy has been updated to reflect the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) and the ePrivacy Directive for our visitors in the EU (European Union). This update to our Privacy Policy takes effect May 25, 2018. This page may be updated from time to time as needed.

Please read the information below:

1. Who we are

Photoshop Essentials.com is an online Photoshop training resource, owned and operated by Steve Patterson. We began operation in October 2006. Our website address is https://www.photoshopessentials.com

Our YouTube channel is https://www.youtube.com/c/PhotoshopEssentialsTV

Our mailing address is:
Photoshop Essentials
P.O. Box 20011
Strathroy, Ontario, Canada
N7G 4C9

Our email address is [email protected]
We can also be reached via our Contact page.

2. What are cookies?

Some of the information that we, along with any third party services, collect about our visitors as detailed in this Privacy Policy is stored as cookies in your web browser. Cookies are a way for websites to remember something about you, and most websites require at least some cookies to function properly and provide you with the best experience. To learn more about cookies, including how to control and disable cookies in your browser, please visit the Cookies and You website.

3. What data we collect and why

This section of our Privacy Policy offers information on what data we collect from our visitors and why we collect it.

Log files

As with most websites, Photoshop Essentials.com keeps a record of the activity on our website, both for security purposes and to help troubleshoot any performance issues with our site. This record is stored in log files.

The personal information we record about you as a visitor to our site includes your IP (internet protocol) address, your ISP (internet service provider, such as AOL or Shaw Cable), the browser you used to visit our site (such as Internet Explorer or Firefox), the day and time of your visit, whether you were using a desktop, mobile or tablet device, and which pages you visited. The information in our log files is deleted at regular intervals.

Our log files are stored on a secure server operated by our web hosting company, Media Temple. Media Temple is Privacy Shield certified to comply with data protection requirements. You can learn more about Privacy Shield, and view a list of Privacy Shield certified companies, on the Privacy Shield website.

Contact forms

To allow our visitors to contact us with questions, comments or concerns, we provide a Contact page. This page includes a contact form which can be filled out and submitted. The contact form requires you to enter your name and email address so that we can reply to you if needed.

No information collected in our contact form, including your name, email address or message, is stored on our server. Once the form is submitted, the information provided by you is sent to us as an email, and no other record of the submission is kept. Your name and email address is not shared with anyone.

If you wish to contact us without using our Contact page, we can be easily reached by email at [email protected].

Memberships

Photoshop Essentials.com offers membership to our website, granting members full access to all of our Photoshop tutorials as PDFs. To enable and manage your membership, certain personal information about you is required. This includes your name and email address, along with your chosen password. When you log into our website using your account, your IP address is recorded for security purposes. We do not share any personal information about our members with any third parties.

Member information is stored on a secure server provided by our web hosting company, Media Temple. Media Temple is Privacy Shield certified to comply with data protection requirements.

Membership payments

All financial transactions on Photoshop Essentials.com, including payments for memberships to our site, are handled by PayPal using PayPal's secure servers. Any personal information required by PayPal is required by PayPal only, not by Photoshop Essentials.com. We are not involved in the financial transaction process, and PayPal does not provide us with any financial information about our members. We are notified by PayPal only when a financial transaction has been approved, at which point the membership setup process is completed. If a transaction is declined, we are not provided with any information as to the reason why. No financial information about our visitors is obtained by Photoshop Essentials.com or stored anywhere on our servers.

What happens when your membership expires?

Photoshop Essentials.com does not automatically renew memberships. If you as a member decide not to renew, simply do nothing and your membership will expire on its expiration date.

When your membership expires, your member information is not automatically deleted. It is kept on file in case you wish to renew your membership with us in the future. We do not store your member information for any other reason, and we do not share it with any third parties.

Your rights to your information

If you have an account on Photoshop Essentials.com, you can request to receive an exported file of the personal data we hold about you, including any data you have provided to us. You can also request that we erase any personal data we hold about you. This does not include any data we are obliged to keep for administrative, legal, or security purposes. Please note that we are not able to delete your information while your membership is active, as this would prevent you from accessing your account.

To request a copy of the data we have on file for you, or to request that the data be deleted (for expired or inactive memberships only), please contact us either through our Contact page or by emailing us at [email protected].

Newsletter

Photoshop Essentials.com offers a free newsletter to which visitors can subscribe and be notified of our latest Photoshop tutorials. To subscribe to our newsletter, we need to obtain your email address. The newsletter is then sent to the email address you provided.

For privacy and to combat fraud, we require that you grant us explicit permission to add you to our mailing list. This is done by confirming your email address using the link provided in the email we send to you. Only upon confirmation of your email address will you be added to our mailing list and begin receiving our newsletter.

How to unsubscribe from our newsletter

All newsletters we send out include an Unsubscribe link. You can choose to unsubscribe to our newsletter at any time simply by clicking the Unsubscribe link in the newsletter.

What happens to your email address when you unsubscribe?

If you choose to unsubscribe from our newsletter, your email address will be deleted from our mailing list. We do not keep email addresses for unsubscribed users on file.

Comments

Comments are disabled on Photoshop Essentials.com.

Media

Photoshop Essentials.com uses various media, including images (jpg, png and gif files) and videos. This media is used to visually enhance our website and to assist with our Photoshop training. We use Amazon.com secure servers to store and publish the images used on our website. All image files are stored securely on Amazon servers. We do not enable or allow visitors to upload or display their own images.

Videos used on our website are embedded from our YouTube channel and hosted on YouTube's servers. We do not enable or allow visitors to upload or display their own videos.

Embedded media from other websites

Articles on this site may include embedded content (e.g. videos, images, articles, etc.). Embedded content from other websites behaves in the exact same way as if the visitor has visited the other website.

These websites may collect data about you, use cookies, embed additional third-party tracking, and monitor your interaction with that embedded content, including tracing your interaction with the embedded content if you have an account and are logged in to that website.

4. Third party services

This section of our Privacy Policy details any third party services we use on our website, the reason we use them, and the information these third party services collect.

Google Analytics

The best way we have for knowing how well we're doing is by the number of visitors our website receives. To learn this information, we use Google Analytics, a free service provided by Google. Google Analytics tracks information such as the number of visitors that each page on our site receives, the general location of our visitors, the number of pages viewed by a visitor, and the amount of time a visitor spent on our site.

Google Analytics does not track any PII (Personally Identifiable Information) about you as a user. It provides only generalized information.

As a user of Google Analytics, we do not (and will not allow any third party to) use Google Analytics to track, collect or upload any data that personally identifies an individual (such as a name, email address or billing information), or other data which can be reasonably linked to such information by Google. We include this page to outline our Privacy Policy and we comply with all applicable laws and regulations relating to the collection of information from visitors.

Google Analytics uses cookies. To learn more about cookies and how to control and disable cookies in your web browser, please visit the Cookies and You website.

Google AdSense

Photoshop Essentials.com is provided as a free service to our visitors. To help monetize our website, we use Google AdSense to display ads. Some of the advertisers may use technology such as cookies and web beacons to send these advertisers information about you, including your IP address, your Internet Service Provider, the browser you used to visit our site, and in some cases, whether you have Flash installed. This is generally used for geotargeting purposes (showing New York real estate ads to someone in New York, for example) or for showing certain ads based on other sites you've visited (such as showing gardening ads to someone who frequents gardening websites).

DoubleClick DART cookies

We also may use DART cookies for ad serving through Google’s DoubleClick, which places a cookie on your computer when you are browsing the web and visit a site using DoubleClick advertising (including some Google AdSense advertisements). This cookie is used to serve ads specific to you and your interests (”interest based targeting”). The ads served will be targeted based on your previous browsing history (for example, if you have been viewing sites about visiting Las Vegas, you may see Las Vegas hotel advertisements when viewing a non-related site, such as on a site about hockey). DART uses “non personally identifiable information”. It does NOT track personal information about you, such as your name, email address, physical address, telephone number, social security numbers, bank account numbers or credit card numbers. To learn more, visit the DoubleClick website.

Personalized vs Non-Personalized ads

There are two main types of ads that Google AdSense can display;personalized ads and non-personalized ads. Personalized ads are more useful to you because they're based on your interests, demographics and other criteria. Personalized ads use cookies to provide advertisers with this information. Non-personalized ads are less useful because they are based only on the content of the web page you're visiting. While non-personalized ads still use cookies to allow for frequency capping, aggregated ad reporting, and to combat fraud and abuse, they do not track any personally identifiable information about you.

Privacy Policy update for EU visitors (May 25, 2018)

To comply with the new GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation), as of May 25, 2018, Photoshop Essentials.com will allow Google AdSense to display only non-personalized ads for our visitors in the EU. Changes to this policy, if any, will be updated on this page.

5. How to contact us

If you have any questions regarding this Privacy Policy or require further information, please contact us at any time.