making lecture notes for students with hand drawings and handwritten text

Question

I am a teacher and I have been making lecture notes for students with sketches and hand written notes all in Sketchbook with my Wacom Intuos Pro. It was working really well but I started loosing work because Sketchbook would crop large section of my notes after I had pushed them off screen to "bring up" more blank area.

It seemed like it was possibly a bug so I switched to Photoshop since I have access to it. I'm not an artist and I know nothing about Photoshop. Does anybody use Photoshop for this kind of a thing?

Do you know of any good Youtube videos or courses on how to master basic pencil sketching, writing words with the pencil, highlighting, changing colors of text, making geometric shapes etc.?

Is there an "obvious" software I should be using that isn't Photoshop? I don't mind the learning curve if there is a good resources (I just can't go buy a 500 page book on editing art etc.).

Any thoughts would be much appreciated!!!

Answer 1

Teachers are awesome!

Have you tried Microsoft OneNote? It's really great for note-taking. You can also convert handwritten notes into computer/typewritten texts.

You can access them in the MS OneDrive cloud, and all your notes are in the same place. But you can't really edit photos (so, if needed, maybe edit photos in Photoshop, then copy them to OneNote?)

Answer 2

Before you move on to a different software make sure it is a bug rather than a modelling error on your part (aka. stupid user error except user is not usually stupid just over optimistic, or misunderstanding). This is important as Photoshop will most probably have same problem as sketchbook if it is the later problem.

Sounds to me like you just lasso the area and move it off screen. Well in that case its almost certain that you will loose the pixels because the default document has nothing outside the screen. Note Photoshop also does not have anything there either* this is not a bug - it is simply the model the applications work on.

However, nothing stops you form making a bigger canvas than you screen, or smaller. Maybe its time to make a smaller screen first then zoom it to 1:1 and see what happens that will fix your confusion. Note that just pushing it out may be a bad idea as you may still push it on something else. So once you have a canvas bigger than you screen dont push things out just pan out.

Anyway you are really looking into a page description like editor. They dont have this problem as there is quite a lot ow world outside the page. But they achieve this by not using pixels. Which limits the expressiveness from sketchbook like experience as you are now longer working directly with the medium. Unfortunately a trade of you need to make for being able to push stuff outside the storage area in a raster document. But then we are looking at updating your understanding even more.

So no without reflecting on why you loose data there is no easy way out, without doing even more work than reflecting.

* Except under some circumstances photoshop may choose to keep the pixels

Answer 3

One interesting program is MyPaint, that has an undefined canvas. You can move the already used canvas and draw more around. http://mypaint.org/ and It is free, so you can share the native files and the students can open them in their homes.

Do not use Photoshop for this.

But probably a good workflow is to save from time to time.