Technologies used in my production

1. Before creating my final product I had some Photoshop skills however
these could be very limited. Photoshop is used for editing products
such as magazines because they provide all the tools to do so. In order
to start learning how to use Photoshop in more advanced ways I took it
into my own hands to watch YouTube videos like the one below to
teach myself new skills that I knew would be very useful when
producing my magazine front cover, contents page and double page
spread. It was important I became familiar with the tool bar especially
as this is the key to producing the product / image. Once I felt I gained
enough knowledge to start producing my magazine in a effective way I
began and here are some of the following features that came in very
useful along the way:

2. Photoshop tool bar
This is the photoshop tool bar which
enables you to produce your product. As
you can see each tool is labelled and the
most useful tools I found within Photoshop
was the move tool because it allowed you
to move items around, magic wand tool,
type tool and paint bucket tool. This is
because they allowed me to manipulate my
image to how I wanted.

3. Text Tool / Text editing
Here is an example of me using
the text tool. As you can see in
the bottom right I have the text
layer on Photoshop selected
and I am using the colour pallet
to change the colour of my text
to red so that it fits into my
colour scheme of red, black and
white. I also knew that I could
use the top bar to change the
font, text size, alignment, style
and add any other effects to my
text. All of which came in useful
when manipulating the text in
my final product.

4. Result After Manipulating text, Before
and After

5. Transform / Scale Option
The transform and scale option
under the edit tab on photoshop
was extremely useful as it allowed
me to change the size of my
image by giving me drag boxes in
each corner of the image. By
holding the shift key while
dragging the boxes it kept the
image in a fixed state so none of
the images quality was disrupted
by it becoming stretched.

6. Scale in action
As you can see I have the image layer selected in
the bottom right and have used the scale option
make the image bigger to fit the photoshop canvas
better. This process was useful through the whole
production of my product to ensure all the images
fit correctly on the screen.

7. Stroke effect
The stroke effect was very useful on text to make it stand out. Here I show how I
applied it by selecting the text layer in the bottom right and double clicking. This
then brought up the layer style dialog box which had stroke as the bottom effect.
By applying it I could change the colour setting and size of the stroke. I went for a
black stroke to help the text stand out because it contrasted from the light
background colour.

8. Ruler Tool
Another particularly
useful tool within
Photoshop was the ruler
tool. As you can see here
its located under the
analysis tab and places a
blue marker across the
canvas. This allowed me
to ensure everything was
inline such as the page
numbers on the contents
page. As you can see here
I tested it and all the page
numbers are lined up.

9. Other technologies used
In the planning a research stages of my product I used various different
technologies to present my findings. These included PowerPoint,
Publisher, Emaze, Slide share, Gif maker and YouTube. These where all
very effective tools to use as the allowed me to present work in
different ways which helped make the research more visually pleasing.
Once finished all the work on the websites I then had to use the embed
code to add the presentations to the html section of the blog post.
Because I had experience using these software's in the past I found
them very efficient for me to use as I was use to navigating around
them.

10. Canon 1300D
The camera I used to take the
pictures for my product was the
canon 1300D. Before using this
camera I had no previous
experience so at first I found it
quite difficult to use but eventually
after some practice over one
weekend I suddenly became
familiar with the cameras controls
and managed to be able to use it
effectively when taking my
pictures.