Teaching a Photoshop Class - General

Alright so I'm in a class called BIM 2, it's basically a course that furthers your knowledge of Microsoft Office. (It's a joke, teacher doesn't even teach. Makes us do online courses that do all the teaching.) All of a sudden she asks the class if we would like to learn Photoshop. (There's already a class for that.) Everyone's hand raises up of course. Me being an avid user of Photoshop for about four years thought it would be a good break from this horrid class. The teacher knows I'm good with Photoshop, suddenly prompts me without asking to teach the class about it, ok. She asked me to design a plan for the next classes to make tutorials and assignments for students to do. After all of these shitty online courses; I don't want the class to have to do that with something 2x as hard as office. I kinda have a frame of mind of what the first two classes are going to be (Learning what the move tool does.) But I don't really have any ideas on what kind of assignments they can do. It'd be great if you guys could give me some ideas, but please don't direct me to websites that have tutorials. I don't want to use someone else's. Tl;dr I'm teaching a Photoshop class, I need ideas for assignments. Help a brother out.

I'd do an introduction with the basics of Photoshop (short introduction into each tool with an example, same for layers and their settings and the filters). After that some practical examples like making a magazine cover including improving the background image (preferably a face which includes usage of different tools) or making the 2D sheet of a 3D model based on normal photos e.g. stretching a car's door from an image so that it is flat on the sheet (there should be some freeware model viewers which support custom skins just to preview your results). Since you don't earn money from it it should be fine to pick content from Google Images. Just a spontaneous idea from my side. [editline]5th December 2012[/editline] What would be entertaining is picking some good Photoshop contests (for example from this forum) and make images for these (you could post your class' results then).

Thanks, I think I'll start with copying one persons face to everyone else's.

You should first ask them WHY they want to learn. If a bunch of girls want to know how to make their bathroom mirror pictures mostly black and white excluding their blue superman baby tees with sparkly text that say "NERD <3" in the corner then please tell them to fuck off for me. But in all seriousness you should ask them why.

Well, I'm taking a class in Photoshop right now, and our first assignment was to find a very high res picture of a band or musical artist of some sort and Photoshop yourself into the band, and use lighting effects and curves to make it look legit. It was actually great, because I've never really bothered trying to make my Photoshops look real until then. There was also a project where we used the stamp and heal tools to retouch an old ripped and crinkled photo. My favorite was a project where we had photos of every teacher in the school and we used parts of different teachers' faces to make an entirely new teacher, using a buttload of adjustment layers. And it's gotta look real, of course. But first teach them the basics, like selection tools, drawing tools, layers, feather, etc.

[QUOTE=BigJoeyLemons;38716640]Well, I'm taking a class in Photoshop right now, and our first assignment was to find a very high res picture of a band or musical artist of some sort and Photoshop yourself into the band, and use lighting effects and curves to make it look legit. It was actually great, because I've never really bothered trying to make my Photoshops look real until then. There was also a project where we used the stamp and heal tools to retouch an old ripped and crinkled photo. My favorite was a project where we had photos of every teacher in the school and we used parts of different teachers' faces to make an entirely new teacher, using a buttload of adjustment layers. And it's gotta look real, of course. But first teach them the basics, like selection tools, drawing tools, layers, feather, etc.[/QUOTE] Perhaps lessons that work on a couple specific tools at a time, eventually utilizing them all in a project? Something easy like faceswapping or photoshopping themselves into a picture is pretty easy to do.

[QUOTE=McNab;38714775]You should first ask them WHY they want to learn. If a bunch of girls want to know how to make their bathroom mirror pictures mostly black and white excluding their blue superman baby tees with sparkly text that say "NERD <3" in the corner then please tell them to fuck off for me. But in all seriousness you should ask them why.[/QUOTE] I think I've figured it out. I had the class today and it went well.

I just learned photoshop recently by playing around with the options. Now i've turned half my friends into african american thugs. It's quite astounding how realistic it looks.

So you do the work of teaching and the teacher gets paid for it? Seems like you're being used here.

[QUOTE=ProWaffle;38723760]So you do the work of teaching and the teacher gets paid for it? Seems like you're being used here.[/QUOTE] Yeah, pretty sure this isn't legal. Though it sounds like you'd be a much better teacher anyways.

I have a teacher who gives out (seemingly) Public Domain assignments, and they all seem to be from one source. I'll look for it later, some of the assignments are really useful.

Well the teacher is very nice, and has great knowledge of what she teaches. But she lets these online courses do all the work. I didn't want the class to sit through hours of fill-in-the-blanks papers, listening to boring narrators give instructions about Microsoft Office. So I didn't deny her request that I teach Photoshop. Some students were asking about how to change eye color, and remove blemishes; so that's what we're going to work on tomorrow.

Just don't show them what content aware fill is, back when I was in class teacher showed us that and my god. half the room just sat there fucking around with it for the next 2 hours not listening to a word he said.

[QUOTE=KnightVista;38731549] Some students were asking about how to change eye color, and remove blemishes; so that's what we're going to work on tomorrow.[/QUOTE] Selective color and spot healing are two of the best things they ever put into Photoshop. And yeah, save content-aware fill for the last week.

One of my tasks when I was learning was to create a UFO evidence photo, not sure if I still have the file but I did pretty good. Teacher judged and the best one got a Snickers.

I think I have a source on those assignments I mentioned earlier, some of them have the name O'Kilen. I figure that using that, you can find them on the Internet somewhere. Also, I thin Adobe provides some tutorials as well, but they may be a separate download from the program itself.