Evaluation - question 6

I have learnt that the use of technology has simplified the matter of producing my media text. The use of a digital camera, a PC loaded with professional software, such as Photoshop. With software such as this it becomes very easy to manipulate photos.

Photoshop was very hard to use at first as I have never used it before, but with my teachers help I found it somewhat easier. As I hadn’t used it before and everyone else seemed more advanced than me I was worried that my final media product would be of a lower quality. I also thought that using the tools on Photoshop was very time consuming at first, because I didn’t know where the certain tools were, it was also frustrating at first when I wanted to do something to my images, but I was unable to do so because of my lack of knowledge of Photoshop. I also found using the different layers really difficult and if I done something on one layer and wanted to move it, the previous layer would also move which was frustrating as I would just delete the whole thing and start again.

Editing my images was fairly easy after learning what to do; I used the ‘spot healing brush’ to remove visible spots and blemishes from my models face. However after erasing these ‘faults’ I thought that I was cheating my readers, as I wanted them to have a real and un touched model as the cover of my magazine. I thought it would be unfair to the consumers who where buying the magazine because most images on magazines are really airbrushed. In the media industry I discouraged the involvement of enhancing technology to ‘fool’ the audience, but I realised it was better as it would make me magazine sell by having an attractive model on the front cover with no imperfections on this basis I used a distort tool called ‘diffuse glow’ to add a slight glowing effect to the models.  This was the only tool I used to enhance my image. On the right is the difference in the photographs before and after the use of Photoshop.

Using a higher quality camera helped me dramatically and the final product looks far better than using a lower quality camera. Refer to blog: Post 'equipment used for photography' for evaluation of the use of camera and equipment used to take my images.The best form of technology was the use of the internet, which helped me further my research and helped me gain a lot of information on how I wanted my magazine to look like.

These are my final images used in the final product.