I recently ran a new training course aimed to teach people the basics of Photoshop. It was focussed around the world cup and was delivered to a class of gifted and talented students from St Lukes Science and Sport's College in Exeter.
This course needed to engage the class by including content that was current and relevant. The aim of the workshop was to design a desktop background or screensaver for your smartphone, tablet or computer. This was the finished result of the exemplar and the idea was to help the class to create something similar with their favourite celebrities.
The training workshop covers the following skills on photoshop;
• Cutting out parts of a photo
• Changing the focus of an image
• Splicing images together
• Adding text
• Adding effects to text
• Changing colours of a photo
• Overlaying Images to a photo
• Adding gradients and transparency
• Saving in different formats
• Learning about the difference between resolution and size
• Creating different document sizes
The class were also shown how different effects can change the finished product;
To get the class started on photoshop and used to some of the main editing tools, I asked them to find a picture of their two favourites celebrities and splice them together into one image. The technique was demonstrated with Simon Cowel and Cheryl Cole;
This was a basic example, but the class ran with the idea, the most popular being members of one direction spliced with one of their various ex-girlfriends, the most frequent example seemed to be Harry Styles and Taylor Swift.
The workshop was a really great experience for me as I have never done a workshop with a class of secondary school pupils before and they really ran wild with their imaginations. Some of their creations were a Mordor-themed Lord of the Rings background, a celebrity, lying on a couch in the middle of a forest and Davina Mccall cycling on Mars. The pupils were all really well behaved and a pleasure to teach for the few hours.
I was really pleased to receive this feedback on the session and am excited to get stuck in to the next opportunity.
“The Photoshop Workshop that Cosmic ran for us here at St Luke’s was excellent. They were brilliant at keeping us informed about how the day would progress and what the day would involve. They let us play a key part in the initial creative process and that worked really well for us.
Alex (our trainer) was great with the students and both encouraged and enthused them throughout the day. He was very knowledgeable and made the session very enjoyable. It was well worth the money and we would (and have already!) recommend to other schools. Thank you!”
Laura Pearce
Head of IT at St Luke’s Science and Sport's College
Blog written by Alex Jackson