Induction Evaluation

The first piece of work I have completed for AS Media production is the magazine cover above.  I learned new skills in photography and Photoshop in order to complete this cover.

I had never used an SLR camera before taking these pictures so I learned a lot of new photography skills. I put the focus setting to manual then focused my image by turning the ring on the camera until the subject became focused. My first image was not in focus at all but I made it in focus by adjusting the ring. I have learned that the t-stance is important whilst taking images as your body is acting as a tripod, therefore I was in a comfortable and correct position to take my photos. When taking a picture I learned that it must be portrait for the magazine cover to work as the front cover of a magazine is always portrait. I made sure I tried to have the eye line in the upper part of the frame in order to follow the rule of thirds. On a few of my pictures I didn't use the rule of thirds and the photos didn't look like they were taken very well. When choosing a background I wanted something that wouldn't distract away from the subject so I chose trees and also used a wall for some of the shots I didn't use for my actual cover. Below are two pictures. On one of them the subject isn't central so I didn't want to use this for the front cover because I wanted the subject in the middle. The other photograph wasn't good enough because the rule of thirds wasn't used therefore the subject is too far down in the frame.

I opened up the picture I wanted to use on Photoshop and put it onto an A4 document. I used the text tool to create my masthead and I used a font that was bold and easy to read because if it was on a shelf in a shop, customers would need to be able to read it easily. To choose the colour of my masthead I used the coulour picker and picked out a colour from the clothes that the subject was wearing. I did this so that the colours of the image and the text would match. I double clicked my text layer which enabled me to look at the different effects I could have on the layer and I put in a drop shadow to add a bit of depth to the text and I also put on a gradient overlay so that it wasn’t all just one colour. I also put a slight bevel and emboss effect on the masthead to make it look slightly 3D.

I put my sell lines onto the page and I didn’t put much thought into the font style at all, if I was to do this magazine again I would choose a different font because I don’t really like the one I used here. I would also change the leading as the lines are quite spaced out, whereas on a real magazine they would be closer together.

I used the elipse tool to create the circle on the left of the page. I held down ‘shift’ as I was making this to keep it a perfect circle. I placed the reward sell line in the circle because I think that readers of the magazine will be drawn to the circle and the ‘Win’ that is in a different colour. To rotate the word ‘Win’ I pressed ‘cmd’ & ‘t’ to ‘transform’. I used the rectangle tool to do the same for the middle sell line. On all of my sell lines I used a drop shadow to make them stand out a bit more.

If I were to do this again I would probably download some new fonts for my magazine as I didn’t put much thought into the fonts used on the cover. I think the cover has the right amount of colours used as I think more than three would be too many. Cutting out images and putting them on the cover isn’t something I did on this cover but I think it would make it look more professional and so would things like a barcode, price and issue number and/or date.

Overall I have learned a lot of new skills by making this front cover and I now know ways to make future magazine covers look much better than this one.