Photoshop and Digital Collage

Overview: Photoshop and Digital Collage Workshop

Age Group 14-18
(This is a four day, 3.5 hour per day workshop. However, this curriculum can be broken down into more sessions.)

Objectives:

1. To introduce students to Photoshop as a tool for combining meaningful information from several image sources, including personal photographs, the Internet and their community to make collages that are both printer and Internet ready.

2. To teach students how the different components of digital images affect the final product of a digital image, for example resolution requirements for printing versus screen resolution.

Aspects of Photoshop Covered:

• Basic edits including resizing, flipping and rotating images, and brightness/contrast.
• Copying and pasting layers
• Selection tool
• Move and Transform tools
• Lasso tools
• Eraser tools
• Brush tool
• Creating Solid Layers
• Text Layers
• Layer Masks
• Filters including Liquefy options

Media Literacy:
To engage issues of responsibility and ethics of using image found on the Internet. To encourage students to explore the relationships between everyday information and creative license.

Day 1

*Start with getting to know each other games, assuming that this workshop has pulled students from several schools. This is crucial for helping nervous Photoshop newcomers relax.

*Walk students through creating their student folders for the class:

Student Name:
>Source Images Folder (Where you store images for your projects, no collaging from this folder)
>Working Images Folder (Editing happens here, copy images from the Source Images folder before changing them)
> Completed Images Folder (collages ready for printing and posting onto the internet)

*Project 1:

Successfully combine two images. Start by showing the finished project, so students can see what is expected of them. (This workshop covers a lot of information, so it is important to make sure each student has created a collage during this first class, so that they feel comfortable with new software.)

In one file that you have made accessible to every student, have the two images ready for them to open in Photoshop.
Walk through opening both files in Photoshop. Use magnetic lasso to cut out part of one image. Paste that selection onto the other image.
Walk through renaming and using layers, the move tool with transformation controls, eraser tools.
At the end, students will have created their first digital collage.

*At home Assignment:
Seek out and bring to following class, photographs/digital images from home and bring in one flier posted somewhere in your community.

Day 2-3:

*Lecture:
What is a digital Image made of?
What is Image resolution?
Adequate Printing Resolutions versus screen/Internet Resolutions
The power of the individual pixel
How find high quality images for collaging
Jpegs, Tiffs and psds, what does it all mean?
Ethics: Copyright protected images

Looking at collage Artists, both who work digitally and by hand.

*Following Projects

Over the next few sessions, have student create 3-5 of their own collages large enough to print out using personal and found images. Review tools from the first Project, introduce text layers, filters, liquefy tools, layer masks any other functions relevant to a particular student’s need.
These projects will push students to explore Photoshop’s potential on their own as well as with guidance.

-Continue to emphasize good work-flow habits: properly naming filing etc…

Day 4:

*Printing and resizing final products:

As a group, go over Image sizes, file types and have them format copies of their own work for appropriately sized high quality prints web images.

This workshop has been taught at the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston using Photoshop CS4 and an Epson 4800 printer. http://www.icateens.org/node/1920