Our very own Ken Pratt was asked by the IAC to run a two day instruction course recently on Adobe Photoshop and the course
took place at the Wansfell residential college in Epping forest. John Astin, one of the course members reports...

So it was that nine IAC members, two ladies and seven men, two from Yorkshire and seven from the Home Counties, arrived at Sunday tea-time for the IAC’s first Photoshop Course to be held here. It was led by course tutor Ken Pratt, who has worked with Photoshop since it first appeared in the 1980s, and who turned out to be very much both enthusiast and expert.

These two-day IAC courses start after dinner on Day 1, use the whole of day two well into the evening, and end around 4 p.m. on day three. The college has a dedicated computer room, with about twelve computers, each with Photoshop installed, so on this course there was no need to share. Ken brought a lot of his own equipment (I know – I helped to load it all back into his car at the end!), and we were able to watch his workings projected onto a big screen.

As Ken said, Photoshop is a very powerful but not very intuitive programme – it’s full of tools with not very helpful names (how do I use a ”Sponge” Tool? - I don’t make dirty videos!!). He set out to teach us the basic principles of how the various tools work, believing that once we had grasped these, we could then use them to achieve whatever we might want to create.

Ken had prepared for us a CD of lessons (which we were able to take home at the end), and we worked through several of these as he explained what we were hoping to accomplish, and exactly how to do it. So, we went through Image Improvement, using “Auto Colour”, “Replace Colour”, the “Sponge Tool” (it actually brightens a dull picture), the “Dodge Tool”, the “Unsharp Mask”, and so on.

In more specifically video-related matters, we learnt how to save items as Alpha Channels, which in Premiere can be used in transparency as masks and frames, with the video showing through. We looked at making picture frames, at putting routes on maps, and at producing and manipulating text, particularly for video covers. Time and again, we were gobsmacked by what can be achieved in Photoshop, once you know how!

The group photograph featured with this article was taken by course member Chris Taylor, and he then used Photoshop to place himself into it afterwards. Can you see the join?

The joy of a course like this is that with only nine participants, it’s almost as good as one-to-one tutoring. As soon as you get stuck, the ever patient Ken has the time to come over to you, and quickly put you right. Little time, therefore, is wasted in frustrated inactivity. More experienced course members help the less experienced. You work at your own pace, with time to make notes about what you are doing, so that when you get home, you can follow your own notes, and successfully repeat what you were achieving on the course.

No need, therefore, to have to remember everything on the course as you go along. Scope for senior moments!!

All of a sudden Ken would tell us something so simple, a shortcut, perhaps, on the keyboard, that you’d never realised, that would have saved you hours of work, had you known beforehand. And then everyone rushes to their notepad, and hurriedly writes it down - another priceless nugget! At the end, Ken said he hoped the Course had
been fun, that we felt a sense of achievement, that Photoshop had been considerably demystified, and that it had been value for money.

Source: The Newsletter of Westcliff Film and Video Club

Page updated on 14 February 2008

Authors' views are not necessarily those of The Institute of Amateur Cinematographers

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