What are the essentials?

I am a high school teacher for my day job, and this year my other life as a photographer has been found out so I have

been asked to teach a beginner digital photography course. (I think that it's funny that I announced I'm a teacher then

proceded with a run on sentence with two passive verbs in it lol.) Anyways... I am putting together an outline for the

course, and I have the basics of the camera functions, settings, etc. Then I get into photoshop, but they just need

the basics. The question I have is what are the essential skills you need? I have a list in mind myself, but I wanted a

little input from others who know, and may have a perspective on it. I'm not going to put my list, because I don't want

to have others read it, and think I mean the same thing they do, but I am missing out what they think is the most

important part.

So that's it:

If you were teaching a newbe the essential skills of photoshop what would you focus on specifically?

 

Thanks for any input.

First and foremost, how to think in terms of triple backups. I don't know what sort of IT landscape in which you and your students find yourselves, but practicing good file storage hygene and being able to recover from a destructive save-over, etc., is one of those annoying little bits of reality that might be worth a mention. I'm sure you've already addressed the rest of the essentials, image-wise.

One aspect to focus on, which I think is lacking the world of digital users, is the basics of the sensor and the processing of the sensor data to make a raw file. I don't mean the physics of it all, but just the basic principles of how the sensor records light and what happens when it gets converted to a digital raw file. Then explain the white balancing and gamma process and how you go from a raw to a jpg. Then go on to photoshop.

As you are a teacher... sorry for the ordinary grammar and sentence structure. Normally I write more better than that....

You don't need any of us to tell you that. There are lots of books out there with real life projects that can tell you that.

 

But first and foremost, for young people there is only one real important essential and that's having fun. Teach them some simple corrections that have great impact like some colour correction/contrast enhancement, cropping, b&w conversion and the lot. Make sure it's not a one-off for most of them but try to make them enthousiastic about it. That's what you should do in a beginners course. If you do it right for some the fun will last a lifetime.

I think the question of what to teach is entirely valid. Experienced digital photographers often forget about some of the concepts that tripped us up in the early days. I would spend a little time understanding bit depth, pixels, DPI, etc. I would include methods of upsizing and downsizing images for best results. And you need to get across the notion of taking an okay image and giving it some pizazz by adjusting levels, contrast, brightness, saturation, etc. And most importantly, consider over processing an image. I am involved in a local camera club for fun and can't tell you how many images that are under processed or over processed.

Since you are teaching a High School class, you may wish to teach Photoshop Elements rather than full Photoshop. Elements would be much more affordable for High School students than the full Photoshop. Most commands and techniques in Elements carry over to the full Photoshop.

While I can appreciate the need to understand digital processing and theory in today's photo environment, I would be careful not to neglect the basics of photography itself -- even when learning film photography in my past, you wouldn't jump into the darkroom before fully understanding the camera and the basics of exposure, etc. Make sure you spend enough time teaching them that the most important point of the art happens with the shutter. I think we sometimes forget that in today's world, since some careful digital manipulation can save many a mediocre image (unfortunately). If they can take a good quality image in the camera, post-processing will become less of an issue (although still an important one -- perhaps the 2nd section/advanced course???).

I'd of course cover layers, then level/curves adjustments. How you can save a level/curves and load it for ease of use. Layer masks are crucial-- and w/ that, how to do a soft edge mask and using Guasian blur in a mask.

Save functions and different formats such as .psd and JPEG. How to dodge/burn with the built in tools and using

an overlay and black/white brushes, sharpening, resizing.

 

See The Lights Right Studio, digital darkroom tab, video on how to dodge/burn.

 

Also some color correction with curves or levels.

Don't teach Elements! Teach Photoshop. Really, Elements just doesn't cut it. Photoshop comes together in a

digital photography suite which runs circles around Photoshop Elements, which is for quick edits.

 

1) Using workflow. Adobe Bridge is excellent, too many people don't use it.

 

2) Using layers and layer masks.

 

3) Saving a layered document [.PSD]

 

4) Using levels adjustment layers.

 

5) Using camera raw

 

If you could teach them everything on "cambridge in color", you'd have taught more than the Level III photography

class at school. While there are a lot of other kids in my class who took really cool photos, everyone always

came to me for things like "how do I make this brighter".

 

http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials.htm

Responding to Brooks and Charles, I have to use elements due to budget constraints. If I was doing a series of courses photoshop suite would be the way to go, but this is a one of course, so there is no time to develope the skills that make CS better than elements.

I am actually going to be including a class on GIMP and GIMPshop so my students can get a nearly identical program an home for free. ( I use GIMP more often than photoshop at home because anything I can to without a plugin in CS I can do in GIMP, but GIMP runs faster.)

 

Thanks to everyone for the responces, I am going to include some file management in my course that I didn't think of before, and I think I'll keep with my focus on fixes and layers. (I'm starting with work on capture and composition.)