About the Book
A Semester of Photoshop was written after I spent years searching for a satisfactory textbook for my Photoshop course and was unable to find one. That might sound odd, given the number of Photoshop books on the market, but I couldn't find one that seemed to be designed to be a textbook. They are good comprehensive guides – but they are big, detailed and include far more material than can be fit into a typical course. There are plenty of good "recipe" type books that show you how to complete specific taske – but they don't do a good job of explaining the hows and whys behind the techniques; understanding that's important for the student who's going to be going into the graphics business and will be expected to be able to use this knowledge both to function in the business and to expand their abilities further.
The book is structured in chapters that progress gratually from the most basic concepts and techniques to more advanced material, each chapter building on the material that's come before it. Never the less, it has been written with the understanding that not everyone wants or needs to teach everything and not necessarily in the same order. If you want to teach the chapters in a slightly different order than that in which they're presented you should be able to do so without difficulty.
About this Web Site
My web site as a whole has been online since 1996, believe it or not, but this section devoted to A Semester of Photoshop is new as of September 2013.
(Site policies, etc. can be found here.)
The purpose of this site is to provide supplementary material for both instructors and students using A Semester of Photoshop. It's going to be an ongoing project, with material getting added on a regular basis.
About the Author
I teach Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign at Lasell College in Newton, MA and previously taught Web Development and Multimedia Authoring at Youngstown State University in Youngstown, Ohio. My specialties are digital imaging (photography) and audio production/sound design, taking advantage of my previous experiences as a photographer and recording engineer. I got my bachelors degree in Communications from St. John Fisher College in Rochester, NY and my masters degree in Multimedia Technology from Duquesne University in Pittsburgh. I'm an Adobe Certified Expert in Photoshop.
I was born in Hemel Hempstead, England. My family moved to the U.S. while I was still young and I've lived in Detroit, Rochester (NY), Pittsburgh and now Boston.
You can see more of my own work by clicking on one of these links: Photography, Multimedia
Adobe Certified Expert |
SPE Member |
NAPP Member |