PRODUCTION DIARY

PHOTO MANIPULATION

The first step in photo manipulation was taking the original image and inserting it into Adobe Photoshop in order to remove the background of the image so that it may be used within the final production. For this I used the magic wand tool to do the majority of the work. The magic wand tool simply allows the user to click and select an area of a similar colour which can then be deleted with ease and so was the most appropriate tool for use in this job.

BACKGROUND

After the use of the magic wand tool I then noticed that some grain was left around the edge of the image and so had to remove it with more fine tuned tools, in order to properly see what I was doing I added a blue background to the image since it showed the particles best. I then used the refine edge tool which involved selecting the image outline with the magic wand, clicking the tool, adjusting its parameters to suit the image and then rendering the new image minus the edge.

PATCH TOOL

After having successfully removed the edge from the image I moved on to making the image itself look even better than it did. The first stage of this was to use the patch tool in order to remove any imperfections within the image. This was a process of selecting an area in which no problems were present and was of the same colour/material e.g. another part of the suit and then dragging this selection onto the part of the image with the problem and then pressing Ctrl+F until a suitable match was found.

COLOUR CORRECTION

Initially I began to colour correct the image using things such as auto colour correction within Photoshop in order to bring out the colours of the image to a greater extent. This helped with the final result of the image since the colours are more distinguishable and so the black and white gradient will have worked better than it may have otherwise.

BLACK AND WHITE

I then added a black and white image filter to the image since I felt it was more appropriate for the magazine cover I was hoping to make in addition to it being slightly unique in the fact not many action posters adopt this effect. This was very simple to implement, all it required was for the user to select the layer of the image and apply a gradient to it.

INDESIGN

I now began to create the magazine front cover as a whole. I saw the first logical step to be creating the masthead of the magazine and adding some titles to the page in pre-emption of adding the main anchorage. As you can see I created the “Film WEEKLY” masthead and added the “End Process” tagline in this stage of production. This was a simple process of adding text since I had already identified the fonts I wished to use in my house style task.

DRAFT 1

This is what I considered to be my first draft, still missing many features it is not the most visually appealing magazine cover at this point in time, I liked the current placement of my image and masthead, but was left uncertain about the amount of space left under the tagline. Placing the image into InDesign was easy due to Adobe cross compatibility allowing such transfers between the program to be very simple to do.

DRAFT 2

This was draft 2, as you can see I added several more features into the space which concerned me beforehand. This included a Puff/Pug, other films and a barcode at the bottom. This helped to bring the magazine cover together more but there was still a large gap by my elbow and so I had to think of some more items to go there. Making the Puff/Pug involved creating a circular shape with the “Oval” tool in InDesign and then adding text onto that shape using the features within InDesign. I made the puff pug black in order to fit my house style whilst the text inside it was the other colours of the style, I thought it fit in well with the rest of the poster. I created the barcode using an online generator so that it only links to my magazine.

FINAL PRODUCT

This is the completed product, the main differences between this one and draft 2 is the addition of a shadow to the Puff/Pug, as per suggestion from peer review which helped make the puff/pug stand out more on the magazine cover. As well as this I added text to the barcode stating the date, and above this the website for the magazine. I also shortened the date on top of the masthead in order to make it less intrusive and instead used the one on the barcode as the full date for reference purposes.