Preliminary Magazine Task - Production

For the first part in the production stage of the magazine cover and contents page was taking the pictures that would be included in our task. I had to pair up with another student and we set around the school taking pictures of what we drew inspiration from and would work on our magazines. We had to take quite fair amount of photographs as it would have wasted our time going around the school taking pictures when we didn’t like the few that had been taken, by taking a lot we had plenty to choose from. The picture that would go onto the front of my magazine is a photo of me with a plain white background so it was easy to cut out in Photoshop.

The next part of the production process was the editing of the pictures by using Photoshop. When I uploaded my pictures on Photoshop I began to cut around the picture of me by using the Magnetic Lasso. After the picture of me was fully cut out I inverted the cut and deleted the background leaving just the image of me. With just the image I began to edit the picture itself, I decided to play around with the contrast and brightness and ended up with a faded picture that I thought looked very professional. I then started to create layer and built on these to add detail and information to my cover.

The next task I did was to fill in my background, of which I chose a light dark green, I chose this colour because it stood out and worded really well with my edited photo. I now had to add the details on the front cover e.g. the stories, these were a simple black. I then added a darker green box around the writing and sent it behind the writing. The reason why I did this is, is because it made each piece of text stand out individually and drew in your attention. We were only allowed to use a three colour scheme; the colours I chose were a light dark green, a darker green and black. This colour scheme went very as no colours clashed and they also emphasised the picture on the cover. Another way to grasp attention is the font I had to pick, in the end I picked a very simple font; I also decided not to have any capital letters on the front cover as it made it more informal. Finally I had to add the date, price, barcode and website details to make it look as professional as possible.

 When using Photoshop something I struggled with was the cutting out of the photo, it took me a while to get used to the cutting tool as I have had no experience with the programme before. Overall the main skill I learnt was using Photoshop in general, after watching other classmates and getting help when needed I quickly picked up the essentials on how to use the programme. I am certain that these new skills will be put to use again later on in the course and am happy that I have picked them up as quickly as I could.