Evaluation QUESTION 6

WHAT HAVE YOU LEARNT ABOUT TECHNOLOGIES FROM THE PROCESS OF CONSTRUCTING THIS PRODUCT?

Whilst creating this product I feel that I have learnt immense amounts of information about computer programs such as Adobe Photoshop. I had no idea how to use it when I first started this project! At first I decided to create my magazine on Microsoft Word seeing as I am very familiar with this program as I use it for most of my work. However, I soon found whilst trying to design my draft that there are many limitations to using this program such as you can't edit photos very well on it and that things overall aren't very easy to move around and position etc. Therefore, I got a friend to download the version of Adobe Photoshop for me as I thought it would really benefit me.
After that I had several days of trying out photoshop and getting used to it, finding out what all of the little icons mean, how to brush over spots, how to change fonts by giving them inner and outer glows, manipualting images etc.

Above you can clearly see the difference between designing a magazine on word and a magazine on photoshop, althoug the one on word on the left is my preliminary task for my school magazine, but I think it reflects well how much I have moved on with my skills and how much more photoshop offers you.
For my final pieces I went and used an Apple Mac as it's quicker than my laptop and I had a deadline to make. I then learnt all the short cuts that magazine designers use in the proper industry such as apple+shift to select things, apple+c to copy an image, apple + v to paste an image or feature and apple +t to transform the image and to rotate it a certain way. This made working a lot quicker. However, the only thing I do wish is that I learnt all this earlier so that I didn't always feel that I was under pressure and pushed for time! This would have made it a lot less stressful but I'm glad that I got access to photoshop at all because otherwise I don't think I would have been as happy with my final outcomes.
Learning all of these new skills for photoshop has also helped me in the future as well because I also take Art at As level so photoshop would be perfect for editing photos :).
Photoshop also helped massively where I was trying to get the right font for my title and text for the front page because I had been looking on websites to download some fonts but had found none that I like. On photoshop though I learnt how to edit just plain fonts to make them look better.You can see more about this and how I edited the title in my folder.
I also learnt about pixelating images and making them fit perfectly on the page so that it didn't stretch the pixels. This was some of the main feedback I got on all my pieces about how the images seemed pixelated. This was because I had set the dimensions for the photoshop page too big compared to the photo dimensions I was trying to put on there. This was something I never knew about before so this will probably come in handy in the future to know. However, this did mean that I had to completely re-do the contents page because the images were just too pixelated. This was time consuming but it was worth it I think :)