Looking back at your preliminary task (the college magazine task), what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to full product?

Below are the final and the planning versions of my magazine cover and magazine contents page. I believe that the final music magazine ones are a great deal better than the ones I did for my preliminary planning task. I feel that my photoshop skills did develop quite a bit even though I already had used photoshop quite a bit. During the Preliminary task I decided to keep the background of the image that I used on the front cover, this is because I didn't feel that confident with removing the background to a good standard. When I got around to the final product I did feel confident enough to do this as I have learnt an easier way to do it than what I did beforehand.  I feel that this has made the cover look more effective. Also when it came to making the final products I had learnt to use the clone stamp tool and was able to remove and parts of the image that I didn't want, for example marks in the guitar that I didn't want to be there. Another tool that I used during the process of making my final products was the levels tool. When making my preliminary tasks I just used the brightness/contrast tool. I feel using the 'levels' tool looks much better than using the brightness/contrast one. Another development that I made inbetween producing the products for my preliminary task and my final task was to use layers much more. In the preliminary task I found myself forgetting to put things on different layers so that when I wanted to change something that whole layer would change and not the part I wanted. By the time I came to produce my final product I was putting everything onto seperate layers which made things much easier. I also learnt how to use the 'link layers' feature which enabled me to move more than one layer at a time. Another photoshop feature that I used a lot whilst producing my final magazine pages that I didn't use at all when producing the preliminary ones was the Paragraph and Character windows. These allowed me to have much more control of the text. On my preliminary task products if I wanted the text to be closer together I would put each line on a seperate layer and move the layers closer to each other. Discovering the character and paragraph windows allowed me to reduce the spacing between lines and characters in a much more simple and less time consuming way. My final products use the blending option 'drop shadow' a lot, which I did know how to do during the stages of my preliminary task I just didn't think to use it. I feel that using the drop shadow option on things such as text adds a better look to it.

I feel that overall I was much more confident and adventurous in using photoshop when producing my final products. For the title of my Music magazine cover I didn't just use a simple font in block colour like I did on my preliminary task. I added some red to the title which I feel makes it look more 'grungey'. To get this effect I experimented with different brush shapes and used the paintbrush tool to cover the text layer of the title slightly. Once I had used the brush to go over the title I blurred the layer to get the desired effect. The brush tool that I ended up using was one of a leaf. To get rid of any colour that went off the edges of the title I clicked the text layer and selected the area around the text, then I clicked on the blurred brush layer and cut the excess colouring away, still having the area outside the text selected. During my preliminar task I would never have thought to do something like this and no way would I have been able to figure out how to get the desired effect on my own.

Covers, Planning (Left) & Final (Right)

Contents Pages, Planning (Left) & Final (Right)

When producing my final products I was more aware of how other magazines were layed out so I was able to choose a layout for mine that would be most appealing and effective. I also researched alot for my final products, something that I did not do for my preliminary task so I knew more about magazines an the genre that my magazine would be focussing on and the target audience that it was aimed at.

There were also differences in my planning and reserchig for both the preliminary products and my final products. There was a great deal more planning and research for my final products. For the preliminary task I looked at other college magazine covers and analysed one pre-existing cover on Flickr. For the final products I analysed 4 pre-existing magazine covers as well as looking at a number of covers. For the contents page of the preliminary task I did no research or analysing. Before I produced my final products I put together rough drafts so I had an idea of what I wanted my pages to look like. I didn't do anything like this with the preliminary task. I also did a great deal more research into the target audience of my final products than compared to the research I did for my preliminary task. During my preliminary task I did little to none research. I made questionnaires as part of the research for my my final tasks and got a number of people to fill  it out.