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

Technology has helped me greatly in the planning and construction of my magazine. If I was instructed to plan my magazine and it’s demographic without the use of technology it would have been a lot harder. Using technology I made an online survey using the website questionpro.com, this allowed me to make the survey and send it in mass to my friends without having to individually ask each person to fill out the survey. It also saved me a lot of time as I put my survey online and could carry on with other tasks whilst I waited for enough people to fill out my survey.

Although my magazine is targeted at males and the images in my magazine are largely of males, I still wanted my images to be somewhat hyper-real as it gives males people to aspire to be (Maslow’s hierarchy of needs). I used adobe photoshop CS4 and CS6 to edit my images. I already had a basic knowledge of the software because of my passion for video editing so I found the basic manipulation of images (removing spots, feathering edges etc) fairly quick and easy.

Here is the un-edited photo of my model; I wanted to remove any blemishes, even his skin tone and crop the image. I also wanted to whiten the eyes. I wanted my model to look literally flawless whilst still retaining the reality of the image as it makes the readers want to be the model whilst still believing that the image is not photo shopped. 

Although men are not typically edited to a large extent, I have edited my model quite extensively even brightening his hair and t-shirt to make the image stand out on the front cover.

 I used the spot healing brush to get rid of all noticeable red spots and blemishes.

 To whiten the eyes I cropped around the whites of the eyes and raised the brightness on that area.

To even the skin tone I then air-brushed the image by making a duplicate layer, adding a slight blur and lowering the opacity so a faint outline of the original layer would be shown through the blur.

To crop the image I went around my model with the quick selection tool and cut the background out.

Before actually using the image in my magazine I had decided to put it back into photoshop to lower the whiteness of the eyes slightly as I feel I had overdone it thus making the image look completely fake. 

 

The only disadvantages I found using adobe photoshop to edit my images was that it could be quite “fiddly” to use at times, especially when cropping around people as I would either leave slight traces of the background image behind or I would feather the image far too greatly leaving a white outline around my models.

To actually construct my magazine I used Microsoft publisher. This is not professional software that would be used in the construction of magazines but I feel it did good enough to get my magazine to the level of quality I was aiming for. The plus side to using Microsoft publisher was that it is software I am very comfortable with, having used it for school work for years, this meant I could use the software to the maximum of its abilities. It also meant I could finish my magazine a lot quicker than expected allowing me to spend even more time on it, perfecting it.