Evaluation 6

Evaluation 6

When starting my magazine I had very little in terms of knowledge and experience regarding the use of any photo editing software and blogging websites. I had never actually made a blog before and neither had I looked at many. In addition to this the only real experience I have had with photoshop was  during the preliminary task. Processes such as inserting text were quickly picked up, however things such as manipulating text to change the way it looks took a little time experimenting with to get right. The most heavily manipulated text I used was for my title. I used blogger to document the research I did into target audience and conventions of magazines similar to the one I had in mind as well as to record the surveys I conducted across random students in my college. I also posted pictures from the photoshoots I conducted as well as the history of particular magazines relevant to my magazine.

By using various types of technology it has shown me how technology has changed over the past couple of years which allows me to do a lot more things regarding editing, producing, documenting and presenting my work.

Digital technology is really easy to collect a wide range of Media. It is fast, and efficient to collect things like photos and video, and because of technology improving all the time, it produces high quality content quickly. Digital technology is also good as it is much more portable, meaning that you are not restricted to one location. You can record things in a variety of place, therefore making your content a lot more interesting.

 I used photoshop to create the front cover, contents page and edit the photographs I took. I decided to use photoshop as it has various advanced tools that would be helpful in the process of production. I had very limited knowledge and experience using photoshop so I developed a lot of skills whilst constructing the product and I now feel I can use photoshop effectively to a reasonable standard.

The little experience I had with photoshop I gained through GCSE media, meaning I was previously aware of a few tools. Because of this I felt creating a magazine may be easier for me to do rather than a radio extract or film trailer. I found photoshop really useful when editing my photos and i used tools such as the level editor to adjust the lighting and colour of my photograph. I also found it helpful in making parts of my magazine stand out more, such as the Title and Subheadings, which I used a drop shadow on.


I also used publisher in order to create my double page spread. This is because it handles large groups of text far better than photoshop does. This seemed like a good choice as publisher aligns text properly, make it look tidier and more organised on the page, essential for a double page spread.I have furthered my knowledge of this software as it has allowed me to use tools I had no idea about to help create the double page spread.

To create my titles and subheadings I decided that I need to find more aesthetically complexed fonts as the fault library on adobe and microsoft softwares are not varied enough. To do this I found a site called dafont.com. This websites gave me access to thousands of different fonts, all categorized under different descriptive words. These categories allowed me to easily find fonts suitable for the type of magazine I was creating, so i may use this in the future if I have any need for ornate fonts in any production tasks I may be required to complete.

I used 2 different cameras for the images I used in my magazine; a canon DSLR ESO 1100D to make my main images and a Kodak EasyShare DX6490 to take the small extra font cover images. I already had a bit of knowledge about DSLR cameras from experience but by using these cameras I have developed my knowledge of lighting. These cameras were appropriate to use as they gave me photographs of high quality

Blogger was probably the one piece of technology that I learned the most about. Beforehand, blogger was something completely unknown to me. It is the site that I used to document my progress and ideas throughout my coursework and has proven to be rather handy in keeping track of my progress as I got later into the AS year. At first the site seemed strange due to my lack of experience with blogs, however, by this stage I have managed to get a firm grasp on how it works. It is now almost 2nd nature to me. The tool I found most useful on blogger was the autosave feature as this saved my work on a couple of separate occasions where my laptop had crashed.

One of the most vital pieces of tech I had at my disposal was the internet, primarily the use of Google. I used google in order to research many aspects of my coursework as well as for finding examples of real life magazines, target audience research, information about distributors and much more.