Evaluation part 6

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

When I began my media project, I had no prior experience in using a camera to take professional photographs, and no knowledge on photoshop of other editing programs. The camera I used was a 10.2 mega pixel fujifilm camera.

As I began to take photographs I found out that this camera was not designed to do photographs for media use. However I learnt through trial and error of how to stage my photograph's with lighting, using the appropriate setting on the camera for the situation, for example outside to improve the photograph quality. Some of the first photograph's I took had fairly dark backgrounds and would not have been very effective for use in a magazine. Such as this photograph.

I also realised that in order to make it easier to edit photograph's they would need a plain background. I tried editing a photograph of the 'geeks' with a normal background and had a problem, I had to scrap the use of those as my main photograph's for my double page spread and my front cover because of this. Therefore I used a white bed sheet for my background and had brighter concentrated lighting.
After taking my photograph's I then had to edit them using photoshop. As I said, I had no prior knowledge of how to use this so I began with the basics on my preliminary task just messing around with different techniques. With my actual project I started by adding shapes and text onto my front cover photograph, this would provide the structure of my front cover. As I noticed through my research most photograph's on magazine front cover's over lap the shapes and text, I then used the masking technique on photoshop to 'erase' the parts that were not needed. My photograph was still slightly dark for what I wanted so I lightened it slightly. Here is an example of the first stages of editing.

After adding smaller photograph's and some more text to my front cover I was pretty much finished.
I learned that using photoshop you have to work in layers and layer things as, as with the masking technique if I had put the shape layer infront of the picture layer then it would not have worked. I feel I have improved my photoshop technique substatially because of this project.