Evaluation: Technologies

During the process of making my magazine I have learnt many new skills, especially when taking photos and using Photoshop. I have learnt about the right surroundings to take a photograph in, especially with the digital cameras I was using. I needed to be somewhere with a high level of light as a lot of the images could be dark when they were uploaded to the computers. If necessary I could have used a portable light to position when taking photos in a low resolution area but fortunately I never had to use this. I already knew quite a lot about Photoshop from the previous products we made on their, however I did learn a few new techniques and skills on how to make my product look more interesting. One of these was to use gradients for the page background and there was a wide choice of patterns and designs to choose from. I also learnt how to use guidelines when making columns for the interview on my double page spread. This was very simple but I was never aware of it and it made my page look a lot neater. Finally I learnt new ways to edit pictures by using the special effects which transforms the whole image into a certain setting such as cartoon, rather than editing the brightness and contrast all the time. The models I used in my photographs had to be positioned in a way which told the audience a lot about them which is why I made my female model use very glamorous poses- to connote her status to the reader. I think the made models I used for the image of the boy band looked really good as I positioned them spread out over two benches, all sitting at different levels and at different angles. I had to make sure that all of their faces could be seen clearly and that the sun was not shining in one particular way. I found that this took a lot of time to do as it was hard to gather all of the models at the same time and find a suitable area around college to take the images. The editing of the images was not time consuming at all, it was just being able to get the perfect picture. The use of Photoshop was very time consuming also as the programme froze a lot and the ways in which you could do things could be long winded.