After many media sessions I have managed to create my very own realistic looking school magazine cover and contents page. It proved to be a difficult task for the first couple of sessions; however I thoroughly enjoyed working on my first ever Photoshop creation.
The process started off by creating a flat plan for my magazine cover and contents page in order to work from. I tried my best to make this flat plan with just enough detail so that I could develop it further along the way. Although the whole point of a flat plan is to avoid this, I found that I was not absolutely sure with what I was going to be including on my work at the time. However my flat plan proved to be very helpful in guiding me throughout the first stages of development.It was then time to start thinking about the shots I would be using on my magazine. I created a shot list in order to guide me on what particular shots would be effective on my magazine. I was then set off with a professional camera to take these shots. This was a slightly new field for me in the sense that I hadn't taken professional pictures before. However I found this experience quite easy, I was able to focus the camera correctly as well as zoom in and out appropriately. I took many pictures before finding the right ones to include in my magazine. One thing I could have improved on at this stage was to take a couple more photos of the student for my magazine cover in order to have more to chose from.
The final step of my preliminary task was to appropriately lay out my photos and text to form my two magazine pages. For the first couple of lessons, I found it a quite difficult to use Photoshop to edit these pages. Despite this being my very first attempt at using the software, personally I think I have done a good job on creating a realistic looking magazine cover and contents page.
When it came to saving my work as a jpeg. file, my final edit of my cover was overwritten by an uncompleted version. I did not let this slow me down, I immediately tried to recover my work, when this failed I did my best to replicate what had just been overwritten. Although this had not been done to the best of standards, I did the best I could with the time I had left until the deadline of my prelim. task. I think the only way I could have avoided this mistake is to be extremely careful when saving work and pay close attention to warnings that appear on screen.
On the whole I think that there were some things that definitely could have been improved. However as a first attempt my work met the needs of my brief and typical reader.
