Technologies

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

2.  To make my real media product, the main technology I used was Adobe
Photoshop CS6 to construct my magazine. I hadn’t really used Photoshop
prior to the task except for simply editing images so I didn’t really know how
to use the software very well. Whilst using Photoshop there were many
ideas I had in my head and I knew how I wanted it to look visually however it
was harder to put these ideas to my magazine, as I wasn’t very familiar with
Photoshop so I had to learn how to do it from tutorials online. An example
of this is when I wanted my pug to look like a peeling sticker in order for it to
look 3D so I had to take pieces that I understood from different tutorials to
help me create the final image. Although I had trouble with the tools used
and operating Photoshop I found that with the teacher’s help and online
tutorials it became easier to use.

3.  I began creating my magazine by using basic tools like rectangle tool to make
my puffs, and boxes behind text to highlight it, horizontal type tool for all my
text and crop tool to cut unneeded parts of my images. I then progressed to
using tools like the magnetic lasso tool; I used this a lot when I when a
specific part from an image so I would cut it out using that tool and it would
be separated from the rest of the image that I didn’t need. Sometimes there
wouldn’t be a clear cut so if you looked closely you could see parts of the
image that was unwanted so I decided to use the blur tool to smooth it so it
didn’t look so out of place however it only made a subtle change to the
image that could only be noticed if the image was zoomed in.

4.  Fronter was used a lot in my work as all of my coursework had to be
presented and uploaded to Fronter. I was more familiar to using it than
Photoshop as I would use it to upload documents and read homework tasks
however I’d never created my own page or used it to present information.
Once we were talked through and shown how to create our coursework
pages it was simple to pick up how to use it but I found that it was a long
process because you had to make a different page for each stage we were at
in the coursework and we would also need to have a link back page for all of
these pages to make it easier and more manageable to look through my
whole coursework. I feel that I’ve developed many skills whilst using Fronter
especially in terms of organizational and presentation skills.

5.  Using technical equipment like the cameras was the easiest piece of
technology to use and manoeuvre as I’ve previously used cameras before to
take pictures and there aren’t a lot of features that I needed to use except
the automatic setting and flash if the image was going to look dark. It was
the positioning of the camera that was more important as I had to use the
lighting in a way where there wouldn’t be a lot of shadow and it highlighted
the most important parts of the model like the face but I also wanted to vary
my photographs so they looked different and from different angle which
could impact how the audience felt and if they were attracted by the image.