What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?

I have learnt much more about how to use Photoshop. I didn’t have much experience with the software so I didn’t know how to use many of the advanced features. I started off by using the basic glow features, then got help off my other classmates and looked on the internet for tutorials on how to use the more effective features. At first I didn’t really understand how to use them, but overtime I became more comfortable. With Photoshop, I found it easier than other software’s to manipulate the photos and make them blend in with the background, whereas with publisher I wasn’t as sure on how to make it look professional. Another technology is using a camera as for our images we needed five individual ones each. At first I took plain pictures of one person however, when we transferred them to the computer they didn’t come out well. So when I went to retake them I needed to consider lighting, wind and where they are all stood in the picture. I had to do this so I could get the best picture possible. We also did not use professional cameras so taking in all these different aspects was quite a challenge. When I first started to create my magazine I was going to produce it in Microsoft publisher however, this did not have anywhere near as much features as Photoshop. Because of this it limited the amount of editing you can do to photo’s therefore it may leave your pages looking unfinished and unprofessional. The only problem with using Photoshop is that we could only access it on school computers, so when I wanted to work on my magazine at home I couldn’t. This was a problem as we didn’t have many media lessons a week. This meant that we were limited on the time we had to work on our magazines.

When we had finished transferring our photos we were able to look at them and decide which ones were the best to use. Once we had chosen them, we placed them inside Photoshop and began to edit them. We took a large amount of photos, we did this because when we did it the first time, we didn’t have many to choose from and we also didn’t feel like they would work in a music magazine. We took the photos in a large variety of different areas. These ranged from inside the hall, to outside by reception. This was useful because when we came to choose the photos we had some good locations to use as a background. Other backgrounds that we used were plain walls. Using these was good as it made the people In the image stand out much better. An example of this is when we used a plain white wall. This area wasn’t affected by wind or sunlight due to it being inside. Therefore, as it was inside the image came out fine, so when we moved on to edit it we didn’t need to mess around with shadows etc.