Skills Development Evaluation Essay

The first task we got given was to create the front cover and contents page of a college magazine. This had to be in the same sort of structure as any existing college magazines such as the headline, masthead, sell line etc. The audience for the magazine was to be aimed at students so the cost had to be at a minimal and needed content which all students can relate to. The main idea of this task was a preparation of the Foundation Portfolio so we can get used to using the software and managing our deadlines for the products.

For the Foundation Portfolio, we had to make a front cover, contents page and double page spread of a music magazine. I had to choose a genre for the magazine and base each product around an actual magazine and explain why I chose the product and how I’m going to use the features in my own product. I also had to choose the demographics and psychographics for my product to narrow my options down for the design and how it would look. I used the conventions from magazines such as kerrang and Metal Hammer to create a magazine for a demographic age range of 15-24 as many teenagers buy these magazines more than any other age group.

Before I started AS media studies, I had never used Photoshop (the software we used for creating the music magazine) for any of my other subjects and therefore had no experience when I started. I was only capable of taking the images needed for my magazine and what lighting I needed to use but had no idea how to alter the images using the Photoshop tools for example: the spot healing brush tool, the polygon lasso tool, the blur tool etc. I developed how to use all these skills through experience of making my college and music magazine which is why the drafts of my music magazine’s front cover look more and more professional towards the final product. The preliminary task of making the college magazine helped me a lot in developing my skills with Photoshop ready for my Foundation Portfolio because I was able to use and explore the tools when making my products for my college magazine so when it came to the music magazine I knew which tools to use for the different features.


I used these skills in my Foundation Portfolio to make my products look professional. I was able to cut out my image and put it into a different background without having jagged edges and bits of the background in the cut out. I was able to create the design of the masthead with the text tool and able to choose the colour and font with an outline to make it stand out from the rest of the texts on the front cover. I could use shape tool to create a skyline and a flash on my front cover, I managed to find out about putting a shadow on my flash so it stood out. I also figured out how to change the brightness and contrast of my main image so it blended in better with the background and make the magazine look more focused on certain areas of the front cover. For my contents page, I was able to tilt images and put coloured borders on them to make them more defined. I also put shapes behind text to make those texts stand out from the smaller print so the reader can establish the different sections of the magazine. The use of font colour enabled me to choose what texts needed to stand out the most on the products and differentiate between the features. An example of this was on the front cover where I made the masthead a dark red colour and the main headline a bright yellow colour. I chose these colours because one was dark and the other was bright, this made the front cover more organised and neat. I made sure the house style was primarily only four colours so that the magazine wasn’t too colourful or unprofessional looking. These colours were two dark and two bright. The dark ones were red and black and the bright ones were white and yellow.

 

The first thing I managed to get to grips with when creating my music magazine was the lasso tool (along with the polygonal and magnetic lasso tool) and the quick selection tool. I found the quick selection tool was fast to use but was only good for a rough outline of the image when cutting it out. I then found that the lasso tool was good for getting the edges and making it look neat and professional. I used the magnetic lasso tool to go round the easy parts of the image but the background was different shades and merged with the parts of the image so the tool couldn’t pick up where the outline of the image was. This is where I had to do it manually with the polygonal lasso tool. Once I finished cutting it out, I used the blur tool and occasionally the smudge tool to blend the image in to the background so it looked like I had taken the picture on a white background. I then had to alter the size of the image and the position to make it fit correctly on the front cover. You can see that I changed it several times from the drafts I did when progressing toward the final product.

 

The comparison of my finished college magazine and my finished music magazine is definitely an improvement. The music magazine’s images are cut out much better with no jagged edges and the layout of the music magazine is more organised, with a much better idea of what I was trying to achieve. The image for my music magazine front cover is better cut out because I found out about the different lasso tools when doing my music magazine which shows that I have progressed a lot through actually working on the products. This comparison shows that my skills with Photoshop have improved dramatically by using it over the course of the year. I think anyone who used Photoshop as much as I did throughout the year would defiantly improve their ability to use Photoshop and expand their ability to use it in many ways, such as cutting out images, blurring the edges to make it fit into the background, using the spot healing tool brush and improving the skin tone. The preliminary task defiantly helped me to get to grips with tools and what each of them does and how to use correctly. I wouldn’t have been able to create and design the three finished products of my music magazine if it wasn’t for the preliminary task helping me to understand and use the tools correctly for my finished products.