Evaluation Q6

What technologies have you used and what have you learnt?

The technology software I used to construct my media product, the music magazine was a programme called Adobe Photoshop CS6, I have learnt many skills in this process on how to use Photoshop to get the desired effects I want. I learnt how to create a background using the paint bucket tool, then creating a gradient by going onto the gradient tool and choosing the one I wanted. The other skills involve firstly using the clicker tool to select, then removing a background with either the background eraser or the lasso tool to cut away at the undesired parts in order to blend the model into the chosen background. I found when I removed the background out of the photographs the edges of the model were very rigid ,so I selected the image and went onto the select bar at the top and went onto refine edge to smooth out and fade the models image into the background. I learnt how to colour correct with the colour replacement tool to get rid of colours which didn’t look right with the background a particular problem with the image I had before I edited it was that the colour balance had too much orange so I used this tool to even out the colours after I used the curves adjuster. I did this with the eyedropper to select the tone from the skin originally then brushed over to correct. I also used the colour correct option to adjust hues without having to go to the curves graph to do it. I learnt to use a clipping mask to protect the colours I didn’t want corrected like the skin tone when I got it right. I used the order of the list of layers, to make everything appear in front or at the back of the model by moving the layers to the correct order on the list. I learnt how to insert and edit text then make it the size and shape needed with the font and size bar, then I went onto the characters tab and found different options to make the text bold or italic. I have found that Photoshop is a highly complex programme that can do a lot of interesting edits such as corrections, swaps.

To take the pictures I used a digital camera specifically a Canon power shot 360, I used this camera because it had a good portrait lense whereas the other choices such as my Samsung galaxy didn't have as high resolution. When I uploaded the images with a USB lead, I saved them as Jpeg's and cropped out the unnecessary parts in the images to get portrait eye level shots before I imported them into Photoshop.