I have been trying for years to offer photo processing courses with free software at our adult education centre. I have always been rejected for the reason that Photoshop is the tool of choice and most people work with it.
Recently, I was asked if I could offer GIMP courses, because on the one hand the licenses for Photoshop are no longer affordable for the institution and on the other hand, they can no longer recommend the high costs to the clients.
So, this year I will offer a beginner’s course and, if needed, an advanced one:
Next year it will be even better. Besides GIMP courses they want me to offer courses for darktable, Inscape, Scribus and Blender. Even more, they want to have school holiday programs for children and teenagers with this software!
I’m reserved with the enthusiasm because I’m not sure how it will be accepted, but the willingness to offer free software courses is a positive step.
With “ambitious” licensing (subscription) model of Adobe photography offerings it is unavoidable that people will start looking for alternatives. On chat level potential OSS users are interested does it have modules, whatever it may be for Adobe software.
If there’s anything we might be able to help with please don’t hesitate to ask! I know @paperdigits one wanted to start building out a photography/processing course here (and I still love this idea, but need to find time to devote to it).
I think it’d be awesome if we could provide some standardized type of coursework that people could use as a base (or unchanged). It’s in my notes to start putting something together and see if the community can help.
I spoke to the person in charge of the courses and after her experience she thinks there are roughly the following user groups:
People who occasionally take pictures and just want to improve their holiday photos.
Semiprofessional photographers, who want to make more complex processing, and mostly have worked with Photoshop, but do not yet have much experience with it and want to learn new techniques.
Professionals photographers who have used Photoshop so far and are looking for alternatives. Above all, they want to know how to reproduce the solutions they have made with Photoshop in other software.
People who have used Photoshop for posters, flyers and similar things.
Yes, this is a great idea! I definitely want to be a part of it.
Your GIMP tutorials are excellent and I want to integrate them into my courses. It would be wonderful if we had a site where we could collect and translate them.
I already have a rough idea of how to structure the courses, but based on the above user groups, I am very grateful for any suggestions.
Above all I will be interested to know if any of you have already done such courses and what are your experiences regarding the possible structure?
That was actually very interesting to observe how it developed. It took a while until they understood the basics - the principle behind curves, layers and masks.
When they slowly understood this, the countless application possibilities suddenly opened up for them. Then they really started experimenting. I added something new from time to time and they started to wonder how great the possibilities were with such a free tool!
For me it was remarkable that even the people who have been using Photoshop for years had very little basic knowledge.
Interestingly, no one has complained that the tools are illogical or not intuitive.
My impression was that it is very important to explain the logic behind different tools. If this becomes plausible, it doesn’t matter if something can be more ergonomic or not - more important is that you get the right results with the right usage.