Trial run

On Monday 5th and Tuesday 6th September, ABPS Tuition had it's first foray into the world of Photoshop education. Two clients from D.I.G.O (Defence Imagery and Geospatial Organisation) had requested tutoring services to learn the basics of Photoshop, and to learn about entry level compositing techniques.

In order to be able to have two computers for the clients to use, I had to seek the use of appropriate facilities. In negotiation with CIT as part of my professional development and research for my course, I was able to secure use of the new digital darkroom facilities to run my 2 day course.

One of the first and most important principles of my tutoring business is that I cater to a clients specific needs. In order to facilitate this, I had to find out beforehand what they needed to learn and their current level of proficiency so I could build a lesson plan.

The two clients had slightly varied levels of experience. One had used Photoshop a reasonable amount (rated as a "Beginner") and the other had only received a small amount of exposure to Photoshop (rated as a "New User") I had to take this into account when developing my lesson plans to ensure that both clients would emerge from the tutoring session feeling they had been taught all they needed to know to perform their jobs.

These requirements were fuelled by the type of work these two are engaged in. During the lesson, I covered the important fundamentals of using Photoshop, including elements such as opening files, saving options, navigating the interface and using the various tools.

Once the basic skills of navigating Photoshop and using its tools, we moved onto basic editing and compositing techniques. In order to keep the content and direction of this portion of the lesson relevant, I had sought information from the clients as to the nature of the work they do. The work they do generally involves compositing satellite imagery for planning purposes so I geared my lesson to the skills that are involved in this type of work.

Overall I had to be able to not only plan from the start the skills I would need to teach, but also be able to adapt on the fly due to any difficulties that may arise during teaching, the speed at which the clients were picking up the skills, and any other points the clients brought up during the course.

At the conclusion of the lessons, I received some brief positive feedback from the clients, and I also emailed them my feedback form (see blog post "Forms") to get some more detailed feedback. At the time of writing I had received feedback from one of the clients highly praising the course and stating that he was very impressed.

With the intial trial run proving to be a success, I feel much more confident and prepared for future tutoring sessions, and am now actively promoting my business and seeking new clients.