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

Photography:

The photography element of making my music magazine was something I hadn't really done before so I was very inexperienced at it. I used a high quality Nikon camera due to the fact that I knew getting a high quality image would lead to a more professional look to my whole magazine. In my photo shoots I thought about aperture, shutter speed and ISO and which one's I should implement to give me the best shot. In the end I decided to use a bit of aperture on my feature article shot to make the                                                         background less clear so the reader would focus more on the artist.
Overall I took about 500 shots for my front cover, contents and feature article which gave me a huge amount of images to choose from for the real thing. However due to my inexperience I had to discard so of my images due to lighting as it was getting dark and the images looked unprofessional. As well as that I took some images with bad backgrounds e.g. up against fences which made it hard to edit. Although on the whole I was happy with the images I took and I think they gave me a good platform to base my magazine on.

I used a photo editing website known as Pixlr to edit one of my pictures. I used Pixlr due to the fact that I was happy with the background of my image as it looked urban but it lacked a filter or different contrast. I chose Pixlr over photoshop as it gave me a huge variety of filters.

In the end I decided to make the filter black and white as I thought it gave the image a more unique and retro look.

Another one of the software's I used for editing my photographs was adobe Photoshop. Overall I found that Photoshop was extremely quick and easy to get use to and I found it extremely useful when editing backgrounds off pictures, for example on my front cover image.

Initially the background of my front cover image was a fence with grass at the bottom and although it looked bright the image did not look professional at all. So I used the magic wand tool to edit out the fence and make it all grey. This was a hard job due to the fact that the fence was lot's of different shades of colour so the tool only picked up certain colours but I managed in the end (through trial and error) to create a clean look to the picture. Another struggle was editing out the grass that was over some of the shoes but i managed this once again this time by using the stamp tool.

This is the magic wand tool which I used to edit out the background of the image. You have to highlight the areas you don't want and then delete them. I found this tool very easy to use however it was extremely time consuming and that is something I would like to change if I was to do this task again.

The stamp tool is the tool that I used to blend the grass with the colour of the shoes so it looked more professional and the problem did not stand out. You had to click on the colour you want to keep and then colour in the grass in the colour you want. I found this tool quite difficult to use and I struggled to make it look good so I ended up covering the shoes up in the end.

Another technology that I used in creating my magazine was the website Fontspace. This website has 1000's of free fonts in which you can customize colour and background and although I did not actually use any fonts from fontspace due to the fact that they were blurry when I put them on indesign. However I took a lot of inspiration from Fontspace in finding out how I should have my masthead.

Powerpoint was one of the technologies that I used the most in this project. I used it to create most of my research and planning pages due to the fact it is easy to upload to blogger using a jpeg file. I also used powerpoint over just writing things straight onto blogger as you can make good effects and set it out in a more professional manner on powerpoint. As well as that I used powerpoint in my evaluation to create a video of slides that I can upload to you tube. I had never done this before but I found it quick and easy to do.

Another technology I used that I had never used before was you tube. I only used it once in this project but I earned valuable experience with it. I learnt how to create a channel and then go through the rendering process before adding music to create a more professional video for my evaluation.

Across the whole project the technology I learnt the most from was definitely Adobe Indesign. This was the software that I used to create my actual pages and for my preliminary task I used a simple software (powerpoint) to create my pages so moving to a more complicated and professional software was slightly daunting.
However after only a few hours using Indesign I realised that it wasn't that complicated to use and by just using a few simple tools you could create an extremely professional looking page.

 One of the simplest tools that I used a lot was the line tool. I used the line tool for the majority of my contents page just as a simple template which I then added pictures to etc to help create a professional looking page. I was suprised with how easy it was to create such professional looking pages with simple tools.

  However I did use some complicated tools in Indesign and one of these was the swatches tool. I used the swatches tool to get exactly the same colour of red on my contents page writing everytime in a quick way instead of having to type in the numbers over and over. This tool took a while for me to realise what it actually did but once I got the hang of it I used it a lot over the course of doing my pages and it saved me a heck of a lot of time.

One of the only troubles I had with Indesign was the amount of font choice. I felt as though there was a quite limited amount of fonts and this led to me having to use numerous fonts more than once. However I do feel as though in the end I managed to deal with the amount of fonts quite easily and professionally.

The final bit of technology that I used throughout this project was Blogger. This was a new experience for me as I had never blogged in my life. However I found that Blogger was extremely easy to get the hang of with creating and editing posts being easy. Some things that I found hard with blogger was only being able to upload certain file types, this caused me to have to use software I didn't plan on using but I got used to it after a while. Another thing that I found challenging was moving images around so they were close together. I got round this by uploading the images together as a powerpoint slide so the pages can go right next to each other.