Postby mikemeister_admin » Tue Sep 28, 2010 4:08 am
Greg, no, no one has offended me in any way. I didn't mean to imply that. I just can't understand what is being taught, so there is no point in continuing. I don't understand what was taught the first week, so I'll never understand anything from then on.
The CM class needs to let people know that the class is for intermediate level people, not beginners. A beginner has no chance of understanding CM.....it's too complicated.
I thought this would be the case since the very first week. When that first open week was held, there were people who had taken the class one or more times, and yet still they didn't know how to use CM. They would post their work and ask questions. If these people who were advanced users of CM still had to ask questions, then there was no chance that I would understand CM.
I am not accustomed to a class like this one. Every class I've taken in school (high school, college, whatever) is different than this one. If I went to a math class, the teacher would place a problem on the blackboard, then explain how to solve it, step by step.....step one he'd show you this.....step two, he'd show you that. During that explanation, the students would ask questions. Once the problem was finished, he'd put up a second problem and explain how to solve that one, step by step, all the while fielding questions from the students. Once the second problem was solved, he'd place a third problem on the board, only this time, he'd ask the class what the first step was.....then he'd ask what the second step was. He'd keep asking the class what the next step was until the problem was solved.
Once he saw that we understood the steps, he'd give us some problems to solve at our desks, then ask us for our answers. When he saw that we could solve the problems, he'd assign us some problems for homework. When we got home and did the homework, we'd go about it step by step.
If instead, he said, here are some basic things you need to know, then gave us a video that showed us some tips, then gave us problems to take home to solve, no one would have known how to solve them because we wouldn't know where to start.
That's what I got from this class. We are left to figure things out, and if we can't, we just stumble around, trying different things to see if we can figure them out. I can't learn that way. Maybe others can, but I need to have a step by step process to solve a problem.
With the examples here, I felt like it was a big secret that we had to figure out. Why give us pictures to edit when we don't know what we are doing? It seems to me that it would be better if the first few classes were dedicated to teaching us what tools CM has, how they work, when to use them, and how they interact with each other. Once this foundation was laid, then go on to editing pictures. You can't edit pictures if you don't know the tools and how they work.
For example, the first class should explain what the color spaces are....RGB and LAB. We don't need to know any more than that at first. Bring in the HSB and CMYK at the end of the classes, since we rarely use them. The explanation of RGB and LAB doesn't need to be technical, just discuss that LAB is used when you want to adjust the brightness and not the colors of an image, and RGB is used when you need to adjust the colors of an image. No more is needed to be said, since that's all we are concerned with.
Once that has been discussed, then discuss how a curve works. Explain how you determine what each curve does and what part of the curve needs to be adjusted and how you arrived at that place on the curve. Use simple terms to explain this.
Once the curves have been explained, give us some examples to work on......not entire pictures, just areas of colors to adjust to show us what happens to the areas when you make each adjustment.
Once the curves have been explained, then go on to hue clocks and how they work. Explain how to set one, what the numbers mean, and how to adjust their numbers by adjusting a curve. Let us work on a few examples. Give detailed screen shots and explanations for each example.
Once we've explored hue clocks, explain how to set a shadow, highlight, and neutral point on an image. Explain what they do. Explain why we need to know this.
Once all of this has been discussed, then we can move on to pictures. I would think that would be during the third week. The first two weeks would have been devoted to the above discussions.
What this class has done is to give us some basic information, then we are given pictures to work on with no idea of where to start, what tools to use, how to use them, and what we are trying to achieve. This is why I can't understand anything. I feel like I'm forced to just take a stab at anything I can find just to see if it helps me. I'm stumbling around trying to figure out what to do with no idea as to how anything works. This is why I said that I don't have the basic knowledge that I guess you need to understand CM.
Greg, you have worked your butt off trying to help me, but when you try to explain things, you are starting at a point that is so far above my level that the explanation is incomprehensible to me. If you never explained a "floating neutral", then how am I supposed to know what it is, how to set it, what it does, and why I need it?
By the same token, we are told that we need to adjust whatever to get the hue clocks to read 0,0,0 to get a neutral. Then we are told that we need to adjust the hues clocks to 1,1,1....or 216....or whatever, to get a neutral. I still have no idea what a hue clock has to read to get a neutral because every example we get, the numbers are different, and we aren't told why.
Terms are used that make no sense....like we need to set a threshold hue clock....where is that? I don't see anything called that, but it's not explained, so how can I set it if I don't know what it is, where to find it or how to set it?
These are only a few examples of why I am confused, but I could go on and on.
I am not complaining, I am just trying to explain why I can't grasp what is being taught. Maybe they need to have a beginner's class or make this class a ten or twelve week course, starting out with the basics that I mentioned. I think that everyone would benefit a lot more from the class if this was done. Of course, I would also expect to pay a lot more for the course since the instructor would have to spend a lot more time developing the class. I'd be willing to pay for it though.