DV for Teachers

I was asked some months ago to do a Photoshop workshop for rhetoric students assigned to make a “Visual Argument.” The idea was to produce a composite image that made an argument, but ideally without text. The assumption was that the students would know little or nothing about Photoshop. Taking bits from different images with the Clone Stamp Tool and layering them would introduce not only that tool but working with Brushes, including the Eraser tool, Layers, some blending modes, as well as learning to navigate the notorious Photoshop interface(s). Digging through an older folder to clean out some cruft I came across this demo file, and realized it’s too good not to share.

Search for #PubCampGA on flickr to find’em. I’ve already met several people in public broadcasting from Georgia and Alabama, educators from around Georgia, and some students. I look forward to meeting more people from different backgrounds.

Crossposted at TimMerritt.net

This MacUpdate Promotion offers Xtralean’s ImageWell for $10, half its regular price. It’s well worth it – it’s great for screen grabs and annotations, allows dragging and dropping of multiple images for quick composites, it has great text tools, and built-in FTP and (for me, the beauty feature) SFTP as well. You can even drag and drop any other kind of file on the “Send” button to quickly upload to one of your stored server locations. Supports PNG format with transparency… an incredible set of features, and I paid full price for it years ago. I have rarely recommended software more highly, and at $10 it’s a real bargain.

I’m looking for a good batch file renamer for my photo workflow, and bingo here’s a how-to for Automator from the auuthoritative folks at Peachpit Publishing. They publish terrific instructional books on all kinds of applications.

Via Peachpit’s Automator for Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, Working with Actions Locating Actions to Do What You Want

I didn’t know Paintbrush existed. From the site:

Paintbrush can open and save to most major image formats, including BMP, PNG, JPEG, TIFF, and GIF. Full support for transparency is available for image formats which support an alpha channel (currently PNGs and GIFs). You can also paste images copied from many common Mac applications, including Microsoft Office and Apple iWork.

Ben Long explains histograms and how to correct color problems in iPhoto. Good screengrabs and explanations.

20 Photoshop Tips & Tricks That You Should Know About from Make Use Of, worth a quick post. The brush-resizing shortcut trick – [ and ] (corner brackets) will decrease or increase the brush size; add shift to change brush hardness – alone is worth following the link.

The fine community at Macintouch points to the Mac-specific area on Old Version Downloads – OldApps.com. Find old versions of lots of software, for Mac and PC: older email programs, audio editors, picture editors, FTP programs, and more. They even have older versions of Apple’s QuickTime. Looks like a great resource, especially if you’re spiffing up an older machine to save money.

And teachers always want to save money.

A quick post to this, so I can close the browser tab I’ve kept open for too long: Make Photoshop Faster: 2 little tips to help speed up the tool web designers love to hate. Thanks to John Gruber at Daring Fireball.

Could this possibly be enough? Probably not….

Ok, here you go! Over 320 free Photoshop tutorials, professional Photoshop Training clips, Photoshop Techniques, Photoshop Downloads, Photoshop Elements Tutorials and Photoshop for Photographers Training and Tutorials! And all free!