The hardest thing that I had to learn throughout the process of making my media product Was by far learning how to use the Mac computer systems, and in particular Adobe Photoshop. The first opportunity that I had to get to grips with this programme was when I created my preliminary task for my coursework. For this preliminary task I was instructed to create a school magazine. This was helpful for me because it gave me some time to adapt to using Photoshop to a good enough standard that I could begin constructing my media product.
This was the outcome of my first experience on Photoshop, and is my completed version of the preliminary task. I encountered a lot of frustrating and problematic aspects of Photoshop throughout my coursework. One of these things was that the programme will sometimes crash completely and just freeze, causing any work that I had done in that session to be completely deleted and would then cause me to have to start anything that I had done all over again. This was very frustrating as it happened to me twice whilst I was making my contents page for my media product and I decided that the best way for me to stop this from happening was to drag the document from my memory stick in the back of the computer and save it onto the desktop, so that I could just work from that. Besides all of these negative features that I found whilst using Photoshop, I did find some interesting and extremely helpful ones too. The tool ‘eyedropper’ was one which I found particularly helpful and I used it rather alot during the construction of my magazine. This tool allows you to take a colour from anywhere on the page and saves it so that you can use it in other places too. This helped me to keep my magazine looking professional and matching, as I ended up having a pattern of the layout that I used which was to have the cyan blue colour featuring as a block-background for many of my straplines, titles and other aspects of my magazine. The Macs that I used throughout this process were of this model:
Besides learning to use Photoshop, I also learnt about how to take pictures correctly and to get the desired effect of what I had planned to get before I took them. I needed to take my own pictures for my magazine so I planned before I took these pictures where I wanted to take them, who/what I wanted in my picture, what I wanted my model to wear, what time of day I wanted to take them and the lighting, which were all important factors of my overall final product. I decided that I wanted my model to be posing for my pictures in a street like environment, as my featured article on him was going to be in his home town and at this location, so I found a good spot for my pictures to be taken, which was at a brick wall near his home. I discovered that the best lighting for me to take my pictures was just before I was about to get dark, which, as I took these pictures in April/May time, was at about 6:30pm-7:00pm. The lighting at this time was good because the sun was not out enough to affect my camera and make it too bright to take the pictures that I desired, which were of a dull street corner/environment with dull, boring lighting. I decided this so that despite the surroundings, my model would stand out and look as if he was too good to be living in an area like this and that, being a successful celebrity indie artist, he should be living somewhere in a better and more wealthy location. After finding the right location and the right time of day to take my photos, I then found a model who fitted the right look for my magazine, which was of an indie singer, and then made sure he was dressed in the way that I wanted. So after all of this was sorted out and I was as satisfied as I could be with all of these aspects, I took my pictures. Some where good, some were bad, and I chose the ones that I felt best matched my magazine’s image and worked my magazine front cover, double page spread and front cover around them (not so much the contents page). The best pictures that I felt I took and the ones I used in my magazine are shown below;
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