dasher wrote:
Hi all,
I am chasing some references. I am about to teach photoshop to first year high school students (2 weeks). Having used photoshop for about ten years, I tend to overlook just what beginners need to know about the application. I need some feedback on what people think are the essential basics of photoshop, that should be passed onto the students. Personal opinions, internet sites, newsgroups, books, would all be gratefully appreciated.
thanx dasher.
As someone else mentioned, it depends on what the main point of the course is to some extent.
However, I consider explaining how bitmaps work and how pixels can interact with each other (which is a big part of blending and using different modes) as quite important to understanding Photoshop. While one doesn’t have to understand the underlying mathematics of Photoshop, having at least some limited concept of how it works allows one to predict the outcome of nearly all commands and actions much more reliably.
For instance, it’s one thing to tell people that, of the sharpening options, unsharp mask is the best choice most of the time but it’s quite another for them to know what the filter is doing and how each setting is affecting the pixels.
It’s my feeling that teaching applications shouldn’t be about teaching how each tool, command or filter works but about how the application works on the whole. If you just teach them what this or that tool or command does, they would be just as well off studying the manual. If you give them a solid foundation in underlying concepts, they can take that with them throughout future versions of Photoshop and have a better understanding of the manual when they read more for themselves.
It would help if everything you taught was linked to a meaningful end result rather than as an academic lecture/exercise. It can all seem rather cyptic and meaningless if you just explain what each tool or mode does without showing why it’s useful.
For instance, you could start with a photograph with problems and lead the students through various actions in order to fix each problem with it as a way of helping them understand the basics.
You could include some more artistic/filter-based stuff toward the end but I’d do so with an eye toward teaching channels and how they work since there’s a lot of power in using them that tends to be ignored in favor of flashy filter use.
Two weeks probably isn’t long enough but it’d also really be useful if you could teach them about paths (and how they can be used in selections) and the difference between vectors and bitmaps. That’s something few people outside of graphics professionals ever get a handle on.
Orchid
