The Power of Photoshop

I am usually satisfied with my photos after I've taken them. That may be the result of growing up with film cameras; you can't do much to the picture after you get it developed. So in the years that I've been using digital cameras, I have done little more than upload my pictures to my computer. I view them using whatever photo-viewing program my computer came with. Sometimes I would crop photos because I wasn't totally satisfied with the angle or the composition, but that was the extent of my image editing.

For Tech Trends, though, I have to use Photoshop. We're not doing anything really complicated yet; most of the assignments are using pre-determined filters. But as I scroll through the available tools, I see what enormous capabilities Photoshop has! You don't have to use the pre-set functions. You can tweak every bit of color, brightness, change the viewpoint, create panoramas. The possibilities are endless.

So this is why some people can spend hours editing pictures! I see now how useful it can be. One can edit pictures to highlight certain attributes of one event. That will create an ideal digital representation of the event. This could be for posterity, for nostalgia, for whatever you want it to be.

Implications for teaching? For one thing, a teacher could process images from a concert, for the school's historical archives, for advocacy, or for recruitment. If the images were meant for a yearbook or a scrapbook, one may want to do little editing of the pictures. Perhaps just change brightness and color here and there to make the photographs clearer. But if the images were to be used in a campaign to recruit more students, one could use the various filters and other tools to make the pictures eye-catching. One could create very attractive posters using Photoshop.

Teachers could also consider using Photoshop in a classroom. I don't think I will use it in a music classroom; I think Photoshop is better suited for a visual arts class. I would consider using Photoshop in an electronic music class, as part of an audio/visual assignment. I can see high school students creating a movie and composing a soundtrack to go with it. But my dream job is a beginning band class. I can't see ever using Photoshop in that context. It will be useful to me to recruite and advocate for my program, but not for my students to use directly, unless they volunteer to help me edit photos outside of class.