Evaluation Question 7

Since creating my preliminary school magazine my skills on Photoshop and with a camera have really improved. You can tell by just placing an image of each by each other how well my skills have improved not just practically but also my knowledge on how a magazine should appear and how vital the image is when in comparison with the genre of music. Firstly, I think the most obvious thing that I have learnt is the use of the cutting skills. It’s easy to see that when creating my preliminary work my cutting skills weren’t perfect. However, when you then take a look at my final piece the improvement is very obvious. The cutting out on the final design now looks a lot more neat and rounded. I managed to accomplish this look by improving my skill with the magnetic lasso while I also added the use of the blur tool as an after effect just to make the pictures look a lot more rounded and make them seem as if they are part of the magazine, not just layered on top.

Since the start I have also developed my level of skills with more technical features. One example of this is the filter gallery that I used for some of my pictures. This allowed me to add effects to some of my pictures to help make them look and feel like the genre of music I have decided to make this magazine for. I believe the best example of this is the picture on my double page spread. The look of the picture now suits the genre a little bit more and the effect mixes in pictures taken of casual and smart bands such as Elbow with the unusual take on photography of MUSE. The filter gallery also allowed me to experiment with the variety of effects and the intensity of them. It may have took time but I believe all my pictures now fit the genre of music I went for which I very well helped and put across by the filter that I used on the less alternative rock looking shots. 

Another tool that I am yet to mention the use of in any evaluation is the hue and saturation bar. Although when I used this I used it very gently and made very small adjustments, these small changes are vital to make a perfect and sellable magazine that could compete against the current genre competitors. The tool allowed me to just adjust the colour, lightness or darkness of my images. This can be used to make settings and artists seem darker or rockier to a lighter and more fun and pop related picture. However when I used it for my pictures I just made a small adjustment to the brightness of the pictures either way to just enhance the effects I had already applied in the filter gallery. This overall helped put then artist’s mood and music across in one picture. This would then encourage fans of my genre to purchase the magazine. 

My skills have also improved with a camera. When looking at preliminary work all the pictures are relatively similar in angle and length and I also didn’t really take any thought with the background of the image either and how that would make the picture look. Therefore as you can see I ended up cutting out all of my images which also didn’t go very well at that stage with my poor cutting skill and also showed very little variation which made the magazine look boring and dull as well as unprofessional. Therefore I did a lot of practice shots before decided on my final shots for my magazine. These took into account what my artists were going to wear a bit more so they themselves fit the genre. They also took into account their pose and body language a lot more. A good example of this is the first feature shot on my contents page. The pose up against the tree shows a laid back and free look which represents one side of the spectrum of music available in this genre. The setting for these pictures has also been very well thought through. The brick work and worn out look of it has been used in pictures of real artists of this genre before, the most noticeable being Elbow, who are always photographed with a rather worn out background to show their gritty and down to earth image. However with the genre there is another side of the spectrum that I also covered with the use of the tree and field shot I took, making this magazine suitable to alternative rock fans that enjoy both sides of the spectrum.