In-Depth 2022 Post #1 – Getting started

About In-Depth

In-depth is a project we do yearly in the TALONS program. Over a span of five months, we will diligently learn a new skill that interests us or will be useful to us in the future. In-depth has two main goals: a) to know something about everything and everything about something, and b) to learn what others tell you is important and learn what you decide is important. In school, we are usually taught many subjects to develop a breadth of knowledge. We are told what to learn and how to learn it. Whereas, in the in-depth project we aim to learn a great deal about one skill chosen by ourselves, and with a learning strategy and plan tailored to ourselves. Some examples of previous in-depth skills include cooking, coding, art, knitting, animation, video-editing, and 3D modelling. The project is designed for us to learn something new in a new way, outside of the regular school curriculum.

My Project

This year, I chose to learn graphics/image editing and manipulation. I will learn to edit images and photos, and complete specific tasks such as manipulating color, repairing flaws, and removing or adding people and objects. I will learn how the software works and be able to competently use its tools and features. I will be able to create realistic designs for posters, cards, website elements, and more.

I hope to learn image editing for future uses in school, work, and personal use. It’s a very universal skill that I believe will regularly come in handy for me. In my current leadership project, for example, my team needed to create posters to advertise our event. Image editing skills would have been valuable to create an attractive poster to encourage more people to support our event. Image-editing can also be used in more professional spaces, such as creating quality edits to photos.

Learning Plan

Goals

I want to create a gallery of projects including edited photos, posters, cards, and website elements. To focus on this skill exclusively, I will be editing artworks provided by others, either through third parties on the internet, or through personal connections, such as friends, classmates, or family. Building these projects will allow me to demonstrate the skills I’ve learned. I will start with small assignments to learn individual functions of the software and then move towards bigger projects.

Timeline

My Mentor

As of January 27, I do not have a confirmed mentor yet. However, I am in contact with someone who has told me that they are interested in this role.

Progress Report

After some research comparing my different options, I decided to learn Adobe Photoshop. I chose Photoshop over other alternatives as it’s the most well-known and used application, which makes finding a mentor and resources much easier for this project. I considered learning GIMP instead, as it was free but with fewer features. However, because of the length of in-depth, I thought learning a more advanced application like Photoshop would be more sensible. If I enjoy this project, I may learn GIMP in the future as well.

I’ve also looked up some tutorials online that may be helpful. This is a YouTube tutorial I will probably be using to learn Photoshop’s basics.

My next step is learning the workflow of image-editing. In other words, the steps of editing a photo, image, or creating a project from beginning to finish. Since I learned video-editing for this project last year, I hope to find some similarities and pick up on an arranged workflow much quicker.