Sunday, October 11, 2009

Painting with Light

Here is a great lesson idea from Photoshoplab: how to add dramatic lighting to otherwise dull photograph. It is based on one of my favorite books, Welcome to Oz: A Cinematic Approach to Photoshop, by Vincent Versace. This page has screenshots that your students can follow to get the effect.

Saturday, October 10, 2009

We all Scream for Screenr

All those demos we do...now we can record them to share with others, or to post for our students as a reminder....without buying software. Screenr is free and brings us up a few notches in impressive digital teaching methods.

"Screenr is a web-based tool that lets you create screencasts without installing any software. You just click the record button and your screen activity is recorded along with narration from your microphone. Screenr then publishes your screencast in high-definition Flash format. Screenr makes it easy to share your screencast on Twitter, YouTube or anywhere else on the web. Even iPhone users can view your screencast."

This also shines a whole new light on distance learning. I have many artists asking me how to adjust photos of their artwork in Photoshop (also necessary for AP students) and we try to schedule workshops for them to attend, but some travel a couple hours to get to the workshops. This will be my first Screenr (other than the little test I did).

If you create a Screenr for a lesson demo, please let me know and I will post it here for you to share with the rest of us.