Photoshop• The key aspects I’ve found difficult when using

Photoshop and tools I have used

DPSI found it difficult to create a professional looking and effective double page spread. As you can see there is space in the bottom right hand corner which really limits the effectiveness. I feel as if this is the weakest page of my production and if I had used InDesign it would still not be as good because of my lack of experience of it. When looking at Q double page spreads, not many follow the same layout of what I have chosen to do. My magazine would be a lot more effective if I had followed this type of layout, instead I used a page I found in Q of the November edition.

Editing an imageI found this difficult because I didn’t want to over-edit the images so they look fake but you cannot put un-edited images in a magazine that relies heavily on this. Leading magazines like NME produce really clear images and make the models look flawless without making them look fake. For example, the image of the model below has been edited so much. This may be okay for a makeup advert but not for my magazine. Likewise with the image of Kate Moss, I would not feature images of artists without any makeup and no editing because it reduces the quality of the images and doesn’t explore ways to make it more effective. So to what an extent do I edit images? In the end I went with a natural edit with models wearing makeup as they would look better but not too unedited/edited.

Editing hairAs you can see both Martha and Emily have wild hair that shows up when removing backgrounds. I made the mistake of using a green background when photographing Martha which means that the colour is still visible after using the magic wand to delete any background. To minimalise the colour I found a video on youtube which helped a lot but obviously wasn’t 100% successful. If I had to redo this I would definitely use a plain white background because I can see where to use the background eraser tool better and I found it very helpful this time

Contents pageOn my contents page I used the first letter of the name of the magazine (Undiscover) to act as a feature background. I did this by decreasing the opacity and applying a drop shadow. I think it makes the contents page look really cool and increases the effectiveness by a lot. It is unique to the magazine and adds something to the gaps between the information in the contents, I am pleased that I experimented with this aspect as no other magazine does it.