On Monday 13th May, I spent the day at Koonung Secondary College in Melbourne helping to advance the Photoshop skills of a number of students who were studying a range of art and communication subjects.

For the past three years, Adobe has had an enterprise agreement with the Victorian Department of Education and Training which has provided a wide range of Adobe applications to all their secondary schools.

It is always such a pleasure to see Adobe applications like Photoshop being used in schools, especially in subjects that are not necessarily directly related to digital technologies.

I see Photoshop as an essential digital tool  in education. Every day, and in most curriculum areas, teachers and student are taking and using images to help communicate and construct learning. Adobe Photoshop is the world’s most well known and functional image manipulation software. Some of the basic skills that everyone involved in education should know what to do with Photoshop include:

• compressing large image files into low resolution files for online use that still look amazing
• cropping images
• removing unwanted objects from an image with the various content aware tools
• enhancing colours with the simple filters found in Photoshop

A great resource of beginners and advanced tutorials on Photoshop can be found via The Adobe Help Centre.