Topic awaiting preservation: teaching a class on basic photoshop

Hey all

My buddy is a teacher in an elementary school an hour outside NYC and has asked me to teach with him 2 classes- Photoshop and Front Page. I can teach him about both and he can teach me how to teach.

Student in our class will be other teachers- taking the class for credits geared towards a bump in pay raise. Not sure how this works in other states, but new york public school teachers, once they get their masters degrees- have an opportunity to get a raise if they amass 60 credits. Classes range from traditional in class introduction to Word . . . to walking tour of the history of new york city. Classes are 15 hours and very laid back- we?ll do 2 consecutive saturdays.

Most teachers just want the credits and could care less about the subject matter. For me it would give me some side cash and some great experience I?m not getting in my current job- sitting in front of a computer all day long!

So my question is since PS is such a diverse program- what types of basic things should I focus on? Re-touching photographs?

Any ideas?

Thanks!

When I was in Uni, we had a Photoshop teacher, coming from the print design industry, who focused on : selections ( lassos, magic wand, pen tool, quick mask ... ) and color manipulations ( contrast/brightness, color balance, curves, variations, ... ). Notice that we had already coded some of these effect during the tutorials of Physic and Computer Science.

The teacher willingly avoided to talk about the filters. My little finger says he was fed up to see his former students applying a lens flares on a twisted difference cloud

Actually once you know how to select something and change the colors, you're ready for a really wide range of applications.

re-touching photos is good ... should be fun for students only there for the credits. maybe also a quick lesson on file types (bitmap, tiff, jpg etc) for those wanting to share photos online or use them for dtp ..

sun
//no i WASN'T gonna say 'filters' honest//

Re-touching would be excellent I mean hey that's what the software was intended for when Adobe made it! Plus you could also give a little sneak preview of what PS can be used for. Don't talk about a lot of filters as they can get pretty darn confusing at first; Blur/Noise/a little Stylize that's enough.

Oh and do not even think about paths, they'll be bashing their heads on the wall for days!!

I've taught PS before and it's very hard to decide what to do first. The program is just so darn complex it's very confusing what to start with. Just relax and be calm and don't make any jokes... you're teaching students for God Sakes!!!

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Oh, and obviously, give them an overview of the toolbar, how to use the dock menus, and if you have some time left at the end give them a brief explanation of the system of layers. But don't go too deep into details as you have only 15hours.

Will you give them a little test at the end of the course ?

I don't think CRO8 should give them a test. Just leave them to play around with it for a while, that's the only way you can learn PS. All those books and tutorials just give a boost, the real thing is in creativity.

You know I say that if you want to make the ulitmate 'no copy' layout/graphic, dissconnect the net, hide your tuts away and put your books in the cupboard beacause if you're not creative there's no sense in using PS for graphics.

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hey guys. thanks. I wont be giving a test. and yeah an overview of the toolbar would be good. and I agree with letting them play around with it for a while- only sure way to get them comfortable with it!

Thanks!

Try asking the class what kind of things they would like to learn to do in photoshop. Gage your class based on the feedback.

Thanks Quarath.