By Rhys Jenkins

Photoshop

The main piece of technology that I used for the creation of my music magazine was Photoshop; I used Photoshop elements 5 in school and Photoshop cs3 at home. This program was the best software I could have used for my project, as I found that Photoshop has all the right tools for photo manipulation, whether it was taking a background of an image out with the magic eraser or cutting round and image with the magnetic lasso tool. Though I have learned that with Photoshop being a very high detailed software a lot of the tools would take a while to work out how to use or the desired effects were not found on the Photoshop program. I found that the use of Photoshop to change all my layouts in my magazine was very useful, as with Photoshop you can join layers together and move multiple objects around at the same time.

Photoshop was a really quick way to create all the idea’s I had for a magazine convention, the system was extremely easy to use and also was really functional.

The skills I gained when using photoshop in my project was that I can now join together separate layers so I could move things around with great ease, the colour sample tool allowed me to get exact colours for use when creating new parts to a picture, originally I would have just had to try and get the color nearest to it as possible just using my eyes.

When getting inspiration for magazines I had to use the internet to get pictures of certain magazine namely Q and NME off of the internet, I used Google as my search engine as it offers very quick search speeds, though at home I used Google chrome, that offers and even faster search and also lots of extra tools, I couldn’t use Google Chrome in school because you have to download Google chrome and the school system doesn’t allow downloads without the administrators permission. I learned that the google chrome browser could allow me to have multiple tabs open at the same time this allowed simultaneously to run different applications and windows at the same time.

I also used the internet to design my mast head, Rift, I use the website cool text.com as it offered a versatile amount of designs and colours, it allowed me to customize my mast head to my specific requirements, but I found that you would have to save the image to your computer after you had designed it, you couldn’t just copy it into the magazine, this was a drawback because it used up quite a lot of space. I also used another website called scribd, it allowed me to upload word files and pictures onto my blog without having to copy it all out again in to another BlogSpot, the only drawback with this technology was that the website couldn’t upload publisher files.

I also used Blogspot.com for my project as well, because I had to keep a blog of all my designs, ideas, research, drafts and colour schemes, I found that the site allowed a very customizable blog to be created though the actual blog posting application had some glitches in, So Microsoft word had to be used for other parts of my blog posting.

I took all my pictures with a Optio Pentax digital camera, this camera proved very versatile and allowed for very clear pictures to be taken for my music magazine, I learned though the flash was quite sensitive and had to be used carefully or photo’s would be either overexposed or to dark to be used.

PENTAX OptioS5i – a stylish, ultra-compact and lightweight digital camera featuring 5.0 effective megapixels and 3X optical zoom