Q6: What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing your magazine?

I have learnt a great deal about modern technologies throughout the construction of my music magazine piece, primarily surrounding the implications that surround modern technology and the consumption of media by the audience.However most importantly for me to take away from the construction process were the technical skills that I developed and enhanced, throughout the use of them during my piece. I have developed a greater understanding of how to use them and their significance in the creation of a music magazine, and I feel I have used them to a high standard of quality. 

The video above is about how I refined my skills using the still cameras. Through using these cameras I gained a better understanding of how it is necessary to use a good camera for a magazine photograph, and I also learned how to frame and compose the picture to make sure that it looks good for the purpose it is there to serve. 

How I integrated text around images in my magazine was also a key feature and something I learnt greatly about. I had no experience previously of working text into a Photoshop piece in the same way, therefore I learnt what the conventions of the text was and how technically it should be presented on a page, e.g. the positioning of cover lines, ensuring that the colours did not clash with the background image, and making sure that there was an obvious hierarchy of text apparent and the most important text was demonstrated through different effects.

I learnt a lot of new skills in Photoshop and how to manipulate pictures in a way that makes them look more authentic and connote ideas that I was trying to create in them. I learnt a lot about the more technical features such as the colour balancing and the filters such as Gaussian blurs and others, as well as playing with the layer masks to create different effects on top of the images to make them look a lot more interesting that just plain images. I also learnt how to separate images from a background and this therefore allowed me to place images anywhere on the page and create even better layer effects. 

Downloading fonts was something I was used to as I was aware that custom fonts gave that extra diversification to any piece and made it stand out more, however I had never done so in a way that was so imperative and shaping for the work. My masthead needed to have its own unique font to be identified by, in order to make it more interesting and as did the other main text throughout my magazine. Also I learned the importance of downloading new brushes to give some custom designs to the piece, and again enhance how it looks and make it more unpredictable and hence more interesting to the reader. Along with this I also had to refine my skills of being able to look at something and take inspiration, I gained the ability to find other magazines and base my own designs around them in an original but familiar way. 

I learnt a lot about how technology has effected the magazine world and using this I intergrated some small things into my magazine to give the impression my magazine was up to the times and was part of the technological world. For example the "Resonator Rock Radio Awards" highlighting the use of multiple media platforms in my fictional company, and as well as this using a link to the official website at the end of the article which highlights how my magazine uses the internet as other magazines do.

This video shows a sped up version of the process of constructing the contents page, which was essentially the same process for all of the pages of the music magazine. 

I learned new features about Photoshop I had no previous experience with. Primarily this surrounds the actual editing of a picture itself, using masks and using different colour tools as stated in the video above. 

Editing away the background from an image was the most difficult process when editing the photos. To do this I used the masking tools that I describe in the video, as these allowed me to remove parts of the background without actually destroying the image thus if I made a mistake it could be salvaged.


The image on the right represents how I used a mask to rub around the edges of the model and delete the background. To finalise effects such as these I made heavy use of other effects such as the blur tools and filters that were available to me. In order to succesfully acheive these effects, finding tutorials for the different Photoshop tools became very important to being able to refine my skills. 

 This image on the left is the original version of the contents page image which looks rather different in comparison. The reason is because I used many different new colour effects on it that I had learned from constructing this music magazine and that enhanced my Photoshop abilities. In the edited version, I duplicated the layer itself, and then changed the colour settings of the masked layer before removing aspects of the image I wanted to change, to create a unique effect of having a black and white, cold image use highly contrasted colours that stood out and made the picture look really quite unique. 

The same technique was essentially used for the image of the band, however with this more intricate colour balancing and saturation tools were used, to create an effect that was not black and white but created a somewhat dismal tone to it whilst retaining that rock n roll appeal. Again this was a first and something that I learned especially when using Photoshop for this music magazine. With this there were also the different blur tools and filters that I applied to the image to put extra concentration on the actual band members them selves and less so on the background, this also made the image look more artistic and therefore the presentation of the overall product was made better. 


Overall my photo editing skills were those that were most refined and what I found more technically useful more than anything out of this project, however I was aware of what I learned to do prior to the piece. That being said, it was the technical knowledge I acquired of the aspects of the media world which helped influence what was contained in the magazine and how the presentation would be, but were it not for the different experimentation that I applied on this music magazine I would not have stumbled upon the different effects I managed to create on some of the images, which I am personally really quite proud of and feel they were worth all of the effort and certainly demonstrate that throughout this construction process, I learned a lot about the photo editing industry itself.