Can you really call yourself a millennial if you’ve never edited a photo?

Picture editing is more than a skill one can have, it’s an experience. There are so many levels to picture editing; it is not just slabbing on a filter to an image before uploading it on the gram. If done right, photo editing can go a long way in setting the mood when viewing an image, giving life to a still photo. Photoshop has been around for decades now, serving as one of the most powerful tools in manipulating and enhancing graphics. It would be pretty controversial of me to say that Photoshop is so great, it is capable of altering a person’s body structure/shape in an image. Some would say it ruins the photography industry because the little magic wand can do wonders in changing the style of a photographer. Anyway, to each his own.

Now, let’s talk about the workshop on Photoshop for beginners held by MUSA’s publicity department last Monday. It was the second time MUSA organized this workshop. Room 6305 was packed with students, keen and ready to pick up a new finesse. It started off with an introduction to the Adobe Photoshop application by Milton, who sped through an entire tutorial on how to use the quick selection tool, all of which I didn’t catch because even when information is given to me at normal speed, my incompetent synapses refused to transmit info signals to be stored in my cortex. However, Milton made it up by going over to personally explain to anyone who didn’t manage to keep up during the session.

After about an hour, the participants were divided into groups of five and each group were required to work together to design a poster. Participants were really motivated to design the best poster because the best group would obtain MyBurgerLab vouchers. At the end of it, the best poster was selected by Milton based on his graphic design experiences. It was a pretty impressive poster, given that they only had 45 minutes or so to come up with it. Milton had to remind the participants to be cautious with the laptops around them because there was an incident, in fact two incidents at the last workshop where laptops of the participants were wrecked from falling. Just when he said that, my clumsy a** dropped my own laptop and dented the crap out of it. This was when I established that, Photoshop workshops are the Davy Jones’ locker for laptops.

We all went home winners that night because the session ended with PIZZAAAA! Aside from obtaining new graphic editing skills, participants also indirectly improved their teamwork spirit, especially the groups that consists people who weren’t originally friends. Working with strangers whom you’ve only met for a couple of hours does make collaborating and communicating a bit harder. Also, it was a good bonding time for groups of friends.

Article by Pei Dee

Photos by Daniel Sim