Evaluation Question 6

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

Before I started this course I had no previous experience with Photoshop at all, therefore I learnt everything from scratch at the start of my course, Most skills I have now were self taught as I played around with it loads to make sure that I knew what each tool was, how it worked and how I would incorporate it into my products that I would be making using this particular software. When using Photoshop to make my product I used many tools to create my front cover and contents page. Many tools were used when editing the images for my overall product for example the magic wand tool and the rubber were used to remove the background, and the burn tool was used to make my model look more tanned and to appeal more to the audience. Other tools such as the cropping tool, text tool and the rectangle shape tool proved to be extremely helpful when making my products. As well as Photoshop I  learnt how to use InDesign, which helped me make my double page spread, as it allowed me to add columns which is what is typically used in a double page spread.

Blogger, is the website I am using to make my blog, yet again this is another thing which I had no experience with, therefore I had to learn how to do it, furthermore this website has turned out to be extremely easy to use and allows me to present all my work to the viewer. To personalise the blog I made it more suited to me therefore I went onto change the size of the column, the colour of the background and text, the font and the way it was presented. I chose to represent my blog in plain black and white s that it would be simple and minimilstic and would clash with the images that would be posted on my blog. Another website which was used was Prezi, which allowed me to make an interactive presentation which was used to show the answer to one of my evaluation questions previously.

Finally some software which I had plenty of experience which was used during this process was;

• Facebook
• Twitter
• Youtube
• Digital Camera
• Microsoft PowerPoint
• Microsoft Word

Having already known how to work these programmes/websites I found it easy to work around the problems I had with presented the work how I wanted, for example if I couldn't get an image the size I wanted I would crop it down first in PowerPoint cause i felt confident then I would transfer it over to Photoshop, and I would do this until I felt confident in doing it within Photoshop itself. However after working with the programmes straight up I developed my skills beyond being confident in myself but I find myself helping other people.

Overall whilst in the process of making my product I have learnt a lot based on software and how I can use it effectively to create products such as magazines. I have also learnt to and not to use tools such as using the burn tool in Photoshop more than once could make it look too dark and overly edited.