Syllabus for CIS-103W: Introduction to Photoshop for the Web
Overview: The purpose of this six-week course is to provide a practical introduction to the skills needed to create the most useful and popular images for web publishing. Students will need a copy of Photoshop CS2, familiarity with Mac OS X or Windows, and a rich fantasy life.
Week One: Captioning Cat Pictures
Students will learn to use the text tool to add humorous captions to photos of cats. Emphasis will be placed on Impact, Helvetica Bold Condensed and other fonts that allow you to squeeze more exclamation points onto the picture. Homework: Dump nontoxic liquid on your cat, take a photo and add a caption that implies the cat is feeling remorse for having done something inappropriate.
Week Two: Sig Images and Forum Avatars
Students will learn to create animated images using frames from a movie or television show. In addition, they will use last week's captioning skills to add quotes from the movie or television show. Homework: Create an appropriate avatar and sig image, and post them to an online forum along with a message that serves no purpose but to call people's attention to the images.
Week Three: Removing Watermarks and Adding Your Own
Many images published to the web have someone's name or URL rudely attached to them, making it so that you can't get the credit for your hard work finding and downloading them. Students will learn to use the cloning tool -- or the crop tool -- to remove the offending identifier. They will also learn to add their own identifier, so that nobody rips off their rip-off. Homework: Convince someone that you made that one picture with the kitten running from Domo-Kun.
Week Four: Head Transplants
Given a photo of a female celebrity, and another photo of some underpaid soft-core porn actress, students will learn how to cut out the celebrity's head and place it on the porn star's body in such a way that they can pretend they're seeing the celebrity naked, at least if they're really desperate and don't look too close. Students will learn the basics of using the selection tool, shading with the airbrush tool and keeping their hands out of their pants long enough to finish the assignment. Homework: I'm sure you'll be motivated to put your new skills to use without me assigning anything.
Week Five: Photomontages
Building on last week's skills, students will learn how to make any image "funny" by adding one or more of the following: an Imperial Stormtrooper, the guy from "All Your Base," any fat person in swimwear, Jesus or Domo-Kun. They will be urged to explore the upper limit of how much these things can be used before the whole exercise becomes tedious, then ignore that limit entirely. Homework: Add these elements to Vietnam-era photographs of napalm attacks in order to make them hilarious.
Week Six: Full Dark Elf Conversion
Students will learn to take photos of sexy women and transform them into dark elves using a variety of tools including color overlays, cloning, the smudge tool and crippling social anxiety. Those who are not into the whole dark elf thing may choose instead to turn the subjects into Vulcans, vampires or Supergirl with her top pulled up. Homework: Go out and talk to a real girl for God's sake.
Final Exam: Students must create an image using the skills learned in the course, and post it to a public message board. Points will be scored based on the responses given:
LOL: 1 point
ROTFL: 2 points
LOLOL: 2 points (and one added point for each "OL" appended)
Cool!: 1 point
c00l!: 2 points
kewl!: 3 points
|<3VV|_1: 4 points
Each exclamation point or mistyped equivalent appended to any of the above: 1 point
Cease-and-desist order: 100 points
http://www.wired.com/news/columns/0,72609-0.html?tw=wn_index_4
