Digital Photo Editing

Digital Editing Skills

Students Learn and Practice Basic Editing Skills

I have the great benefit of teaching 7th and 8th graders a Digital Photography/Technology course.  I don't currently have the option of teaching them Photoshop because of the software provided so I have been focusing on teaching them how to use Microsoft Office and www.pixlr.com/editor.  The benefit to these programs is that many of them have Microsoft Office on their computers at home and pixlr is a free online editing program.  I found a great link to download Paint.net, another editing program, from and it also provided photos for the kids to practice on.  Follow this link to get them yourself: Photo Editing with Practice Images. 

Before we practiced editing, we talked about what makes a good photo.  This is my PowerPoint that I use to teach this Tips and Tricks PowerPoint

We have also been learning how to adjust red eye, brightness, contrast and other basic editing skills.  Here are some of the photos (from the site above) that the kids have cropping and one example of the cropped version:

 

The students are each assigned a computer and do their own editing.  I ask that after each assignment, they save and submit their work to me through our school's network drive.  They can just drag their work from their desktop to my "Hand In" folder in which they have each created their own subfolder named after themselves.  It is a great tool to have in a technology class, so the kids are becoming familiar with how to submit things through the computer system instead of printing hard copies of each assignment.  This is especially great for saving ink when we are just practicing simple skills like cropping and red eye removal!