"Photo Editing on the Web" Workshop

I did a “Photo Editing on the Web” workshop this past Friday. It was part of a two day series of new workshops we did for the teachers of the Winston Salem Forsyth County School District. It also gave me the opportunity to revisit a passion of my past that I don’t utilize as much any more. Photography is a part of our everyday lives and also is used when teachers create content for their teacher web pages. During the training I took the teachers to 3 free web-based photo editing sites. All 3 sites offer users the ability to edit their images in a variety of ways. Picnik http://www.picnik.com/ present users editing features but list several of their capabilities as premium, in which the user must pay to use. FotoFlexer http://fotoflexer.com/ offers users several nice features. However, my favorite of the 3 is Pixlr http://pixlr.com/editor/ This site looks and works like a version of Photoshop somewhere between Photoshop Elements and the full version of the program.

During the workshop the teachers edited their images in a variety of ways including cropping, resizing, dodging (lightening a specific area of the image), blurring (removing wrinkles in the faces of people to make them happy), adjusting brightness & contrast using levels and selecting pixels in one image to add it in the image of another picture. I showed them how to feather selections to make them more pleasing to the eye. I even offered to show them how to add hair on the head of a less fortunate individual but we didn’t have a picture of the back of my head, so we skipped over that.

Then I took them to Big Huge Labs http://bighugelabs.com/ to show some of the many possible projects they can create using their photographs. We started with creating a motivational poster and had very little time for other possibilities. I enjoyed showing teachers these wonderful resources and hope to do the workshop again sometime.