Looking back at your preliminary task (the college magazine task), what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to full product?

Before                                              After

Before                                           After

I think I have learnt a lot about Adobe Photoshop CS5 since I created the preliminary cover and contents a couple of months ago. Looking back at my college magazine pages I can see how inexperienced at using Photoshop I was, but it was a good chance to experiment with all the different tools that it had to offer.

Four Photoshop devices I used were:

I learnt how to bevel text to make it appear chiselled, this was especially useful on my mast head as SETLIST written in grey with bevelling and embossing make it look like rock or metal that had been shaped and helped 'toughen' up my magazines image. One thing I disliked about this was that if you changed the angle of the shading on it, anything else using bevel, even on other layers, changed too.

 I discovered that I could use the Clone Stamp Tool to get rid of houses in the background of one of my pictures because they didn't fit how I wanted the photo to look. I also used this tool to get rid of writing on Zac's hand so the magazine could appear more polished and professional.

One of the things I found the most fun on Photo shop was a filter called Liquify where you can make features in a photo larger or smaller and you can move these things around which was very helpful for making band members look more awake by widening their eyes or when one of the photos was pulling a strange expression I could sort it using Liquify.

Another main thing I learnt was how to adjust the settings on the brush tool so that I could use it to even out skin tone or make someone's hair colour more vibrant. Getting the balance of Opacity and Flow is difficult and often I ended up having to undo my work when somebody ended up with a really obvious streaky face, but when I got it right it was very helpful for improving the photos so the entire end product looked as good as it possibly could.

When I was doing my college magazine I wasn't very confident about how to achieve the picture I had in my mind for how I wanted it to look, but as I learnt more about Photoshop and its features I found it easier to plan how I was going to achieve a certain look. I think one really important thing I've learnt is how vital it is to plan the photographs before you take them because even with all the tools Photoshop has, if you take a really rubbish picture, your finished product will suffer. When I went out to take pictures of Chris for the college magazine I didn't have any idea what background I wanted or how I wanted him to pose; whereas, I planned the three photo shoots that I conducted for the main task and picked models specifically, after considering who I wanted my magazine to appeal to.

Making sure you appeal to the target audience and seek feedback from them to check you are fulfilling this was very important and so I had to read magazines I wanted mine to be like and try to mimic the way they wrote articles for example - I also tried hard to use colloquial language that my target audience would use. Small things on the magazine pages turned out to be the things that would either balance out the page or make it look unprofessional. An example of this is that for ages I stared at my Double Page Spread trying to work out what was wrong with it and why it didn't look quite right, then I added in a border to the title and filled it in yellow and the whole page came together. I think going back and looking over the pages helped a lot because I spotted tiny details like spelling mistakes and such that otherwise wouldn't have been noticed until too late, also making other people read over the article was helpful because they pointed out things I didn't see myself.

In conclusion, although I have learnt many Photo Shop skills that will be helpful in the future for me, what I've learnt the most is that planning how I want the finished product to turn out allows you to make less mistakes during the actual construction of it. Because of these tasks and the fact I had to look at lots of different real magazines and professional photos of band's, I think I've developed my eye for what is aesthetically pleasing and I have a better understanding of how to cater a product for a specific audience.