8. Photoshop: Photoshop this year I tended to use only the production and experimentation within my poster and magazine cover. I found when constructing each one that use of layers was particularly useful in each sentence of font, an image or an effect appeared on separate layers which allowed me to edit quickly on each layer several times to get different effects and gave me room to experiment without directly effecting any of the other layers of my poster/magazine. Having so many different tools would initially appear rather confusing at first but within the programme itself it offers and labels help all over the programme. For example: I found that if I was unsure of what a certain tool was I would hover my cursor over the icon and it would instantly tell me what the tool was. I found the programme was also easy to navigate around in that everything was labelled under icons such as effects, view, file.. Just like a word document would. Photoshop allowed me to insert text, images, colours, shapes as well as being able to manipulate any of these to fit the purpose of both my magazine and poster. For example I wanted to exaggerate my idea of using cartoon and the atmosphere of being at school so I create an effect of my character within my poster to look like a cartoon pencil drawing of him in the perspective of a students doodle that would be present at school. This took several layers of the original photograph and several trail and error attempts at creating this effect. Firstly I had to find edges on one layer of the image before enhancing the lightness and contrats.
9. Any problems? I found that although I have used Photoshop regularly enough to grasp the concept and the tools and acquired the knowledge of how to use and create different effects and layers, I found the problem lied within the difficulty of keeping up to speed with all the different layers as id have to remember to name each layer exactly with what is present. By naming each layer this could help me know exactly what's on each layer so that if I needed to slightly edit anything that I could easily and quickly pull the layer up and change it within having any diverse effect on the other layers. Another reminder that I had to do was to save each production as a Photoshop file that I could reopen to work on the next lesson as well as remembering to save each stage as j.peg file so that I could simply upload each image and stage of progression onto my blog. This year I also had to learn to categorise everything into neat and specific folders of work within my H drive the N drive and also the D drive so that my work was clearly labelled and I knew exactly where and what work was in each .
