Draft Q6 of Evaluation

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

As I took Media for my GCSE’s, I am very familiar with the programme Photoshop, which we previously used to create a film magazine. Therefore, I found using Photoshop to edit the images quite easy, as I had done it plenty of times before. However I learnt a few more things about how to create different kinds of effects on the images, which allowed me to put a few of my images into black and white. Photoshop also allowed me to brighten any images that I felt were too dark, and enabled me to play with the colouring. It also offers a variety of tools that help to make the image look better, including the Patch Tool, which enables you to get rid of any marks/blemishes that would make the image look more professional. Also with the actions tool, you are able to see everything you have done at different stages and you can decide if you want them to show or not. I found that Photoshop was very useful in allowing me to edit my photos in order to make them look as professional as possible.

The main programme we used to create our magazines was InDesign. I had used InDesign briefly in my GCSE’s as my teacher thought it would be a good idea to use it to do my contents page. But I wasn’t very familiar with it so I have learnt a lot since beginning our magazines on there. A great element of InDesign is that it allows you to have columns to see the right width and length that your text/images should be. By staying inside these columns I have found that it has been easier to keep my magazine looking as professional as possible. Another useful element is paragraph styles, which allows you to use a certain text size, font and colour whenever you need it. I found this extremely useful when I was creating my contents page as I wanted a Heading, a contents heading and a contents subheading, which would each be slightly different. Instead of having to alter the text each time, I could just click on the paragraph styles and apply to each bit of text whatever style I wanted to use! I found that using InDesign sped up the process of making my magazine, and allowed me to spend more time on choosing the right images, writing my main article and coming up with ideas for features to include on my contents page.

The camera I used to take the images for my magazine was a Canon SLR. This professional camera allowed me to take high quality images of my model which gave a really sophisticated feel. I used a white screen backdrop as it makes the model in the image stand out, and is also easy to edit on Photoshop.