What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?

Photography:
 
-I have learnt a lot, during the process of making my music magazine, about photography such as,
. The setting of the photo is very important to the image of the artists and you need to find the balance of looking good and representing your target audience.
. The position of the sun is again, very important as you either get a silhouetted person or too much exposure on the faces of the band which doesn’t look very professional.
. The angle in which you take the picture- I found early on the just taking at picture looking straight onto the subject makes a very boring photo, as I was looking for something different to stand out in my magazine. I found that taking a picture from a lower angle made a more interesting photo. Here are some angled photos a have taken in the process of making my magazine:

Adobe Photoshop:
-Once I had taken my photos I realised that to add a professional touch to them I would have to use 'Adobe Photoshop' to make them look more interesting.

Here are some 'Before and After' shots:
. For this picture I learnt how to make the image look vintage, which fits in with my magazine and makes it more visually pleasing.
. I did this using the Adjustments- Curves tool. A had to maually adjust the colour curves and the brightness of the image to give it this look.



For this picture I used several techniques:
. The blur tool- I used this to make the band members stand out more and look more professional.
. I changed the contrast of the image to darken it a bit in order to make their facial features stand out more as the angle of the sun bleached them so I had to correct this.
. I also had to lengthen the photo as it did not fill the magazine page. The photo on its own obviously looks like the top part has been repeated but when I added the masthead it is not noticeable.



Adobe InDesign:
- As I had never used 'Adobe InDesign' I had to learn everything from scratch.
. I learnt how to get to grips with the design techniques such as the 'grid design' which was blue boxes that had to fit your text or images and fit with the others on the page and arrange them in front or back so they could be seen or didn't overlap. At first I found this a challenge but by the end I had got to grips with it.
.I also learnt the values of using different fonts in InDesign, as some fonts did not look professional enough to be in a music magazine. So I had to select the fonts on InDesign very carefully.