#4) What have you learnt about technology while making your magazine?

After

The first example of a technology that I used to complete and perfect my magazine was Adobe Photoshop. This allowed me to polish off and define any picture that I took so it looks perfect. This could have been as easy as increasing the brightness to add life or something a bit more technical such as using the clone stamp to remove unwanted parts of the picture that disrupt the photo.

Increase of brightness

Use of the clone stamp

This can be seen in the two images to the left. The first picture was the original that I took when doing the photo-shoot. I didn’t like the look of how the picture was presented but I did like the picture its self and I wanted to use it for the magazine. By using to 2 styles that I had learnt I was able to heighten the brightness to add more freshness and so it was visible to see the artist, his emotion and the guitar its self. However I did still have to remove the shelf that was in the way whilst taking the shoot. So to do this is used the clone stamp tool on Photoshop and whipped the shelf out of the way and help it appear that it was just a continuation of the dark wall. These both helped me get my picture perfect so I was able to use it in the magazine.

At the very start of the course I was asked to do a prelim task for a school magazine. This was to test my new skills of Photoshop and InDesign, see if I could produce a decent front cover and contents (shown on the slide previous) this would then be able to set me forward for the music magazine that I have now completed. So this was my practise for my main product. For my prelim task I didn’t have any knowledge about both Photoshop and InDesign so I had decided to research them both and find out key tools and techniques. This helped me on my prelim task but as you an see by my completed school magazine I had much more to learn. I also realised that the best idea to do was to look for recent school magazines and see how they set out there work. From there I took out what I felt was best and used it in my school magazine, but still wasn’t up to scratch.

After my prelim task I have made sure that I keep practising my Photoshop skills and my InDesign skills so my magazine can reach its full potential and not be held back because my lack of practise and knowledge of the technology. To help me I decided to put a draft of my music magazine on my blog and received peer assessment to help make my magazine better than my first try. This was to make sure that it is as good as I can get it whilst keeping to my research and also making sure it fits my target audience perfectly.

Another technology that I have used in my magazine was Adobe InDesign. This is used by most of the editing teams on most of the recent magazines that we see on the shelf's today. It is used to give me the outline of where I want the tools on my page. It helps me design the magazine the way I want it, whilst giving me a helping hand by providing me boarders and outlines.

This is an example here of the outlines from InDesign. It lets me know where everything is set and it helps me move it around to the best place.

Another technology would be blogger. Blogger has helped me through the whole course of this magazine. It allowed me to set a diary to keep me organised through the design and research of my magazine. Without blogger it would have been very difficult to keep a plan of my research to then actually make a magazine that it to standard of the British selves. That’s what I aimed to do.