I Teach People

I teach my students Adobe Camera Raw

I have just completed teaching a Photoshop for Photographers course at SAIT. It was a very short course at 6 weeks in duration. The students ranged from absolute beginners to the well-versed. I had to decide how give my students the best learning experience.

For this course I chose to focus on a Camera Raw work flow rather than on the usual exposure and colour correction methods most people teach. Raw files give the most flexibility, and the user interface of the Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) converter is much more intuitive than using Photoshop’s levels and curves. Plus, all the new retouching options right in the ACR converter are easy to master, with the benefit of post processing a finished usable file, ready for print, without having to do more work to it in Photoshop. In my own post processing work flow, this is often the case.

For this class, I also taught non-destructive work flow methods in Photoshop, which meant learning to use adjustment layers and masking right out of the gate. At first this was really hard for the students, but by the end of week 5, they saw the endless possibilities and flexibility this type of work flow provides.

Photoshop can be daunting. It has so many menus, options and tools to learn. In a 6-week course you can’t teach or learn it all, but you have to start somewhere. My goal in this course was to start my students off on the best path by giving them a good foundation in camera raw work flow.