Q6. What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?

I’ve learnt a lot about technology whilst making my music magazine from the camera down to the tools in Photoshop.

With the camera I used which was a Fujifilm 10 megapixel digital camera. This produced my bright and good quality pictures used in my music magazine. I learnt about the different lighting you should be aware of when taking photo’s for example making sure the image is taken outside because of the natural light you’d receive from doing that and if you chose to do inside photo’s be aware of the shadow’s you get behind the model on the walls and so on. Not only that but I’ve learnt about the angles of shots, I didn’t just take my pictures in portrait and landscape, I wanted to be more creative and take it from a diagonal angle thinking about whether or not I take it from a high/ low angle shot. This gives it more of an effect and doesn’t just look like a boring picture taken in portrait/ landscape. I also learnt about zooming into the pictures to a good point that shows the model in a medium close up or mid shot and so on. I also learnt about making sure the pictures aren’t fuzzy or blurred but are in good quality being aware of the backgrounds/ surroundings also.

I used Adobe Photoshop CS3 to create my music magazine and edit the different photo’s and so on.  I learned a lot about Photoshop from the process of constructing this product such as adjusting and brightening of the photos, I used adjustments to set the brightness/ contrast and also used the curves tool. From using these tools I learnt that they give different effects and tones to the photos used in my music magazines, making it look more professional and like it belongs in a magazine.

I also learned about using stroke. I new about Photoshop before because I’ve used it before previously but I didn’t know fully about all the tools; while creating my music magazine I realised you could use stroke to give the text used in my music magazine effects and making it more appealing to read and interesting to look at. Also I learnt that you can change/ adjust the sizes of the strokes, so it stands out even more which I didn’t know about before. Not only that but I learnt and discovered that stroke can also be used around pictures not just text and numbers, so I used that in my magazine.

My image was too small on my double page spread to fully fit the A3 Page from this I learned about the cloning tool. This meant that I could clone the background and put it in other places to fill up the space. I never knew about or used this tool before and it really helped me because I was worried about how I was going to deal with the situation.

Similarly, I learned how to use tools such as the guide tool and the new guide tool. I learned that these tools were important to use as it helped me to move and adjust my columns, text and pictures so that everything was in line making my magazine look more professional. For example I used the new guide tool to help me split my double page spread in half so that I can separate the text from the pictures and so the fold line in the middle doesn’t interfere with the texts and pictures.