Adobe Creativity Challenge

On the 3rd May Mrs Anzellotti’s Year 10 Information Software and Technology Class participated in the Adobe Pro Tips for students - Photoshop event. This event is aimed for students 15+ and focussed on enhancing skills with Adobe's professional creativity tools.

Students attended a Youtube live stream presented by Dr Tim Kitchen (Adobe’s Senior Education Specialist) and Abigail Nelson (Adobe Customer Success Manager) from the comfort of B7.

They were shown how to use the camera raw filter which provides tools to repair images by automatically adjusting exposure, colour, granularity, vignetting, optics sharpness, white balance, red-eye, spot remove and geometry. With a click of a button they were able to take a photo from iPhone 3 quality to enhance it so it looked like it was taken on an iPhone 14.

The second tool that they used was the straightening tool. This hidden tool which can be found in the options bar once the crop tool was selected allowed them to straighten the image by drawing a line along where they wanted the horizon to be. Adobe Photoshop then used the angle of the line to automatically rotate and straighten the image.

The image students were given to use featured two young girls playing on the beach. They were asked to remove these individuals and were shown how to use Adobe Sensei’s content aware-fill  (the built in artificial intelligence features) to make them disappear. They then used the clone stamp tool to copy the pixels from the water and the edge of the water to remove unwanted splashes and shadows.

The final part of the live event before saving was to replace the sky. In the past, replacing the sky required multiple steps and careful fine tuning in order to achieve a seamless look. Adobe Sensei did the masking and blending for the students with two or three steps. All they had to do was access the sky replacement and choose a new sky. Most students were happy with the result but some chose to adjust the sliders to modify the sky and blend the foreground with the background.

All that was left was to save. Students were asked to consider what they were going to do with the image. If they were using it for a website then they saved it for the web which they learned would reduce the file size. If they wanted a hard copy then they were encouraged to export it for print.

Examples of some of the student edits can be seen in the images that feature the beach.

Following on from this learning experience students were challenged to apply what they learned to a Photoshop challenge. They were asked to find a free cityscape image and enhance it using the camera raw filter. They replaced the sky, rearranged the buildings and used content aware fill. They used the clone stamp and spot healing brush tools to make the skyline look realistic.

Examples of some of the student edits can be seen in the images that are city skylines.