Millie learned about a wide range of programs that could be used to create media products, including Photoshop, Publisher, PowerPoint, SlideShare, Blogger, SoundCloud, and Google Drive. Through constructing her music magazine, she discovered new tools in Photoshop for editing images and learned how layers work. She found that Blogger provided an easy way to publish and share her work. Google Drive allowed her to save all her work in one place and easily share it with others. Using a digital camera instead of a phone camera produced higher quality images that required less editing.

1. Q6:What have you learnt about
technologies from the process of
constructing this product?
Millie Bevan

2. Before my media product
Before I started the construction not only of my final media product but the
preliminary task I was never aware of the wide range of programs available
that I would be able to create it with. Using various programs allowed me to
discover how creative you can be with your work. During the production of
my music magazine I have used the following programs:
• Photoshop
• Microsoft Publisher
• Microsoft PowerPoint
• Slide share
• Blogger
• Sound cloud
• Google drives – Google docs, forms etc
• Different qualities of camera

3. Photoshop
Before creating my magazine I had used Photoshop briefly in other subjects
for other purposes however never fully understood it to its full capacity. I
discovered a new amount of tools that can be used to create completely
different effects, for example textures, changing the opacity, brightness, hues,
tones and contrast of the image to change how it affects the audience/its
importance. I also learnt how layers work together and are important in the
ease of using Photoshop as a program. As the pictures I took usually had a
background that I didn’t want to use for my final piece I used the magic wand
tool and the quick selection tool which quickly select large chunks of the
background and allow you to erase them immediately, this was useful
because it saved a lot of time. A few other tools I often used was the blur tool
to blur the edges of my images to make them softer and less sharp as this
wasn’t aesthetically pleasing. I used the black and white effect and the
opacity tuner the most on my images because I believe it fitted best with my
colour scheme and theme throughout my product.

4. Blogger
Sharing work with my peers and my teacher over a blog was a totally new
experience to me before this. I had never used a blog before and was
unaware of the benefits it has. It is a fast and free way to publish your work
not only to selected people but allows it to be viewed by anyone in the world.
Blogger was easy to navigate which is a plus side for beginners like myself.
Once you have published your posts you are able to go back and edit them
and also rearrange the order they appear on your blog. Using blogger was a
significantly casual approach to sharing my work and this appealed to me and
it seemed to my peers also. Using blogger opened my eyes to how many
different ways you can publish your work to the masses and also how much
we can rely on technologies in the modern day because of how much we can
do we them and how useful they really are.

5. Google drive
Not only did we use Google drive for work that was related to the production
of our product yet also theory work also. Google drive has numerous aspects
to it that ensure your work is kept saved, all in one place and easy to access.
The main thing I used on Google drive were the Google docs and Google
forms. I used the Google docs to create the text of the interview for the
double page spread of my music magazine, it is easy to use and more
condensed than something like Microsoft word for example. I used the
Google forms to create the questionnaire that I conducted as my audience
research. On Google drive it is easy to share your work with any other Google
user that you might want to, for instance your teacher or peers which
condenses a lot of technologies into one, which is a lot less hassle than having
different documents all over the place which shows you just how much a
simple program can save effort, time and efficiency.

6. Cameras
Firstly when I started to take images for my final production piece I was using my iPhone 5
camera which is 8 megapixels, with 1.5µ size pixels. I found whilst using this for my images
that they often came out blurry and didn’t focus as well as id hoped. The capacity for images
on a smartphone is not as much as a digital camera itself which meant when sending my
pictures over to a computer I could only choose from limited sizes, this then affected the
quality of my images and meant I had to edit them more in Photoshop. Using a camera
phone allows you to transfer images easily by a cable or even simply by email. I then started
to use a digital camera to take my pictures and I found they improved significantly, the
image was more crisp, better colour and focus also. As it was better quality it prevented me
doing too much editing when it came to using them for my magazine which overall for me
was much better.
Here are a comparison of two images, the first taken by a camera phone and second taken
by a digital camera: