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

During the process of constructing my media product I have used several software design programs such as:

By using In Design I have been able to create the text that I have used in my products. On the right is an example of how I reached the final logo for my magazine Warp. By using this piece of software I was able to experiment with fonts, font sizes, text effects and colours.

 

Using In Design I typed out the name of my magazine in capital letters and selected the font Cairo SF and chose the font size 90. I then copy and pasted this so that I created two of the same texts. I filled one of the texts in black and left the other white and by doing this I was able to send one of the text boxes to the back behind the white text and create a shadow with the black text. Using the lettering tools I was able to move letters away from each other and create distance between them. Once I was happy with the logo I grouped the two text boxed together and created my final logo.

I used Photoshop to edit all of the photographs used in my media product. It became evident during my research that most artists featured in magazines are airbrushed and images are edited to suit the purpose of a product. For all of my pictures I beautifyed the skin, removed backgrounds of changed the shape of an image.

Above I have shown the after and before image that I used for my front cover. On the right you can see that the model has a dark shadow on the left side of her face which could distract the reader when looking at the image. I have removed the background so that I could alter the colour of it for the front cover of my magazine.

By selecting the magic wand tool I was able to make quick selections around the image and delete what was not necessary or alter the selected area. This reduced time and saved me having to individually select unwanted areas of the image.

In order to remove the shadow from the model's face I was able to use a healing brush or the spot healing brush tool to remove and beautify the skin.



On the right is a print screen of the dodge, burn and sponge tool. I used the burn tool to lighten the colour of my models hair so that it would blend into the background. I used this tool instead of having to select the background between bits of hair because this tool lightens the hair to the background.

Aswell as this main software programs I used Blogger to record the blog entries and show the updates of my media product. I have also Windows Movie Maker to create some of the videos which are shown on my blog. To add sound to these videos I used a microphone which could be handheld and record sound bites.

I used a Canon 500D digital camera to take the photographs which I have included in my media product. I learnt how to focus the camera with the zoom lens and how much distance was needed when taking the pictures. Before starting the process of constructing my product I had never used a digital camera like this or any of the software mentioned above. I have learnt a significant amount as I had never used Photoshop to edit images but I found that I learnt how to use it by experimenting. Using In Design was not too difficult as is similar to Word in the way that a lot of the fonts are similar but you can add effects to the fonts. The digital camera that I used was not too hard to use as it functions like any other camera but you have additional settings to increase the quality of the image produced.