In my Graphic Arts class, I want to disable the Print option in Adobe Photoshop

When I went back to school about twenty years ago, students would just hit Print without checking what printer they were sending the job to. The people in the college business office were quite bothered when Graphic Design projects randomly emerged from their printers, while the students complained, "My project didn't print".

Could you require that all projects turned in have Page Information printed on them? This would make it clear what program the work was printed from. Of course, this won't stop them from doing the entire design in Photoshop, and then dropping it whole into InDesign for printing.

Could you have them turn it the computer files along with the print, so you could examine how they were created?

I am beginning to wonder whether some of you have forgotten what it was like to be the age of these students.. Set up a roadblock and the smartest among them will consider it a challenge, just as you probably did at their age , and they will work like blazes to get around it, often spending more time on that, then working on the assigned project. Once cracked, the solution will spread like wild-fiire among others in the class. Bet on it.

I suggest you consider my earlier post.(#7)

There is more to be taught in Photoshop class than the software.

and there are a dozen other ways to work around pointless blocks

One approach to this is to simply hide the print commands in Photoshop. Adobe even provides tools for this.

Choose Edit > Menus and deselect Visibility for the Print and Print One Copy commands.

As you can see at the top, menu configuration is part of the Photoshop Defaults file, which means the preferences file. Because hiding commands is a Photoshop feature, there are undoubtedly some students who will read the Photoshop help files and realize why the Print commands are missing. To try and hold them off as much as possible, you could try the following:

• Prevent student access to the folder containing the Photoshop preferences file.
• Lock the Photoshop preferences file so they can't reset it.

I'm not sure how effective this would really be. Also, the dialog box above does not let you hide the Menus command itself, for obvious reasons. So any students figuring this out could try to simply enable visibility for the Print command. Although that may or may not work if the preferences file is locked.

Of course, locking the preferences might conflict with lessons that require altering preferences. It's all a tradeoff, however you do it.

Also, as long as those commands are hidden, students can't learn how to print in Photoshop, and Photoshop printing is a deep subject and its own important skill. But maybe you have a course where that's all they do. I don't have any problem with the notion of printing images through the excellent InDesign print engine, because it's also an important skill to know how to print Photoshop images through InDesign while preserving consistent color.

Talk to your IS people. This is handled by Group Policy in an Active Directory environment, or with third-party management software.

Agreed your students are going to get around any blocked printer because Windows doesn't like blocking off assets... It wants to use them even if you say not to

p.s I also agree with them that InDesign isn't the best tool for the job but I understand that the powers will not listen to voices calling for change

I imagine many of your students use their own PC and Mac.  if I  was one I of your students I would not allow you to modify my machine software.  That's a windmill you will not be able to defeat Don. Students are intelligent not a sneaky bunch of meatballs. Many know way more about software than you do....

Are these computers connected to a server?

Must the printer be available for other Photoshop classes using these computers?