Learning Photoshop

It will come to no surprise to anyone who knows us that our kids are pretty tech savvy. Even Squirt loves to play on my iPad. And so, taking their interest in computers in mind, Brady got them a super cool surprise for this school year by ordering Adobe CS5 master suite.

The suite includes many adobe programs, like Illustrator, Premiere, and Photoshop, which is what I chose to start with. We have our digital art and photography day once a week, and the kids really look forward to it. Adobe has a wonderful website with many tutorials. These have been really nice for teaching the kids the basics. We also got a subscription to a Photoshop magazine, but we are not ready for that quite yet. It has been a blast so far and I really look forward to seeing what the kids can do over the school year.

I usually have them work on the example photo from the video, and then on one of their own. For today's lesson, we started to learn about adjustment layers. The kids were to add a black and white layer to their photos, change the opacity of the layer, and then chose some area to mask the layer. Spike was giggling while working on the lesson photo as he made the mans head the only thing colored in the photo.

Here are their pictures before and after editing.

Gizmo

Spike

Just for fun, Gizmo decided to play around with Photoshop and do another picture.