What have I learnt about technologies through the process of constructing this product?

Throughout the process of constructing this product I have learned a great deal about technologies and they have vastly helped and improved my Music magazine, especially how to use Photoshop and InDesign correctly. I also regularly blogged about what I've done during the process of creating my product to help for future reference.

Technologies used to create my product:

• Digital Camera
• Internet Explorer/Adobe Firefox
• Adobe Photoshop
• InDesign
• Microsoft Word
• Microsoft Office
• Microsoft Powerpoint
  

My main technologies used were Photoshop and InDesign to create my product; Photoshop for editing my images and InDesign to start the template of my Music magazine. Having already worked with Photoshop, I had a rough idea how to work the software and establish which tools to use in order to produce my magazine the way in which I wanted and needed to. I now also understand the important of using tools in the media, how to use them more often and produce any media text in a professional way. It has helped me to add 'brushes and filter' to both my Preliminary task and my Music magazine once it was finished on InDesign. I used basic tools to position and alter my product such as the cut tool, text tool, selection tool,

Tools that I have used in Photoshop when editing photographs:

• Brightness
• Contrast
• Colour balance
• Glowing Edges
• Smoothness
• Curves
• Cut Out

It appears in today's society that an image has to look it's best, whether the whole of it be Photoshopped and almost changing the entire person's features or only using it slightly, but the majority of magazines of modern day society tend to use a lot of it. Despite how the model may look already, manipulation of the photograph must attract the audience and be valid enough for them. It also has to be altered enough to draw in their target audience. Also, I have learnt that a colour scheme is extremely important,  it can alter the entire magazine towards a different target audience or even knocking a magazine off the market. For example, a brightly coloured and child-like product for young adults+ would not appeal to this audience. On the other hand, if it were a black, white and red colour scheme (this tends to be a popular choice) makes the magazine look much more professional and inferior.

InDesign is a complex program at first and I found it quite challenging as I had never encountered it before. We eventually grasped the basics and it became a lot easier to use, and understood it more. It helped to produce the layout of my Music magazine by including the fonts, inserting text boxes for my coverlines and pull quotes, etc. InDesign allowed me to position, alter and rearrange pretty much everything on my magazine to make it look like those of a professional standard.