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

 

I have been using Blogger to display all my work on the products and previous products.  I had not used Blogger before so this was fairly new to me.  I would happily use Blogger in the future since everything that I needed to do was easily found and executed.  The internet connections I used for producing this blog is not always to reliable so my first thought was that there's the opportunity to lose progress if the internet were to cut out.  When using Blogger I didn't lose any because I learnt that it frequently autosaves posts.  However I found it very difficult to work with images when making a post on Blogger, they seemed to not work well with text and was almost impossible to move into a place you wanted them to be.







I used a 3 piece lighting setup to take all the pictures in my magazine.  The pictures I ended up with are well lit, with little shadowing.





Photoshop was the main piece of software in the production of my magazine.  I had used it before my magazine but not nearly used the amount of tools and functions that my magazine required.  Apart from the basic tools i.e: select, move, zoom, I used a variety of more advanced tools, filters and blending options such as the strike blending option which applies a fully customisable outline around whatever is selected.  I used a thick yellow line for my contents page pictures to emphasise them more against the dark black background, and used a brown strike effect on my double page spread image to get it to look like a cardboard cut-out.

The gradient tool was also very helpful to get my backgrounds more interesting than just a solid colour.  I used different styles of gradients on all 3 of my products, for my front cover I used the radial gradient mode this was to try highlight my models by making the colour lighter around them and get darker as it reached the edge of the page.  On my double page spread I used the angle gradient mode this split the page in half diagonally which made the page look more interesting.  Finally for my contents page I used the linear gradient mode which allowed me to split the page up into to halves but quite gradually so it didn't look like they were completely separate.




The "Background Eraser tool"  was one of the most useful parts of Adobe Photoshop when it came to producing my magazine.  When clicking it your cursor becomes a circle with a small cross in the middle, where ever you click it samples the colour that the small cross is over and erases all the pixels that the circle covers that are the same colour.  I used this tool to cut around the models in my magazine because it would erase all the background without affecting the outline of the people in the photo.

I also used the warp tool in photoshop a couple times.  I used it to foreshorten my masthead to give it it's 3D effect (Top right).  I also used it on the "FREE PICK" writing to get it to curve around the star graphic.








I used flickr for some of my analysis and found it very useful, and user friendly.  I would definately use it again if I ever need to analyse another picture since it wasn't very difficult to highlight parts of the picture that I wanted to talk about so anyone reading it knew exactly which parts I was talking about.