Question 6: Evaluation

6) What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?

When constructing my media product I learnt a lot of new things about technologies such as Photoshop, blogger, slide share, Google drive and new camera skills. Photoshop was one of the main programs I used when making my music magazine, before I did not know how to use it very well but I learnt a lot of new techniques during my production.

I learnt how to use certain tools, for example the lasso tool and magic wand tool to crop accurately around my images and manipulate them in a specific way. In particular I learnt a lot when taking and manipulating my front cover image, as I wanted it to look as little like a photograph as possible but still keeping certain facial features. Also I learnt how to use hue saturation, this was an important tool I used when constructing my magazine as its effect was to make normal coloured things like very bright/ neon which was a key aim. Also when making the larger mastheads for my front cover and contents I learnt how to fill texts and cover things with certain textures, again very important when making my magazine. Another thing I learnt about Photoshop was how to change the opacity of certain images, for example the opacity of image behind the text on my double page spread is very low. The image adds depth so it isn’t just plain writing.

In addition I learnt how to use completely new programs such as blogger and slide share. Blogger is a much more interesting and exciting way off displaying work. Blogger doesn’t just have to be text posts but images, power points, charts, even voice notes if you want. Another key technology I learnt was new camera skills; it’s not just an image. There are mid shots, close ups, long shots, high lighting, low angles etc. We had to keep these ideas in mind when capturing our images.

Previously when making my School Magazine, the preliminary task, I used my iPhone camera. Although the quality was quite clear when uploading it onto the computer the image was really small; when resizing it, it lost a lot of its quality and therefore made the overall piece look very unprofessional. Therefore when making my music magazine I decided to use my digital SLR camera. The image quality of this camera is so much better, it’s fast, there is speed of focusing and when uploading it onto the computer no quality was lost.