Evaluation Question 7 - Skills development

Looking back at your preliminary task (the college magazine task), what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to full product?

As you can see within my college magazine there are very limited Photoshop skills used, this is down to me not knowing what I could really do with the program, I didn't know how or where I should use any of the tools. After using the program numerous time I became more confident with it, it became allot easier to see where I could use tools to improve my images. Starting with my college magazine cover, it looks very simple and boring

although you can see I have used the lighting render effect to brighten up my model. I used a very simple masthead with a few very simple cover stories, all very limited in looks and meaning. My new music magazine cover on the other hand looks allot more professional due to a number of newly learned Photoshop techniques and research into other magazines design. Before starting my music magazine research I had no idea where to start with designing a magazine you can see the lack of ideas in the college magazine's contents page, researching definitely help allot during production.

Whilst using Photoshop I learnt about the healing brush tool its used to remove impurity's in the image such as red eye or spots I found it very useful to make my models seem flawless to the readers and make my models connote they are perfect. A very useful tool of image manipulation was the blur tool I used it to blur the background of model to make sure she was the most important part in the image pulling all focus onto her, this is exactly what I wanted as I needed my audience to look at her and not be distracted. The quick selection tool became very useful when creating my cover its used to quickly select similar coloured areas so picking out my model from his original became a easy task. The layout of my contents page was difficult to create until I found Photoshop's ruler tool it made the design and layout much easier to do. I have learnt allot over the course of the project, whilst creating my music magazine I had a more focused audience than my college magazine and I learned how I needed to create my magazine specific for them down to very small details. I learnt how everything from font to language to the colour scheme can represent a different audience.