Front Cover Evaluation

Photography

When taking the photographs I used manual focus rather than automatic. I did this by altering the focus ring on the camera. At first i found this difficult because my own camera has a button rather than a focus ring, but by the end of the process I feel like I managed to focus the photos correctly. Image 1 was the first picture I took and as you can see it is out of focus. This is because I had not used the focus ring correctly and possibly also because I was not using the t stance so motion blur occurred. Image 2 on the other hand is, in my opinion, focused really well because Abbi is in focus and the background is out of focus perfectly.



Image 1



Image 2

I learnt that the t stance was very useful to prevent motion blur, because it allows you to keep very steady but also lets you bend forward and backward to get a better angle on your subject. A big mistake I made when taking my photos was that I did them all in landscape rather than portrait, I did this because I simply forgot we were told not to. This meant that when I went to insert the images into Photoshop I had to enlarge them so that they fitted, this meant that the quality of the photos was reduced; this is something I would do differently next time.

In terms of lighting I learnt that the best place to position my subject was behind the sun, so that the natural light is hitting there face, this is the best way to prevent shadowing. You can see an example of this in Image 2. I also tried taking photographs with the sun behind my subject, but as Image 3 shows this did not work quite as well because there is a big shadow on the left hand side of Abbi's face.

Image 3

The background of my photographs did not matter too much because I intended to cut out my subject on Photoshop and replace it with a white background. However to make my life easier I needed to use a plain background that does not have similar colours to my subject in it. For example, If I had Abbi standing against a dark black or brown wall then when it can to cutting her out in Photoshop it would be difficult to work out where her hair ended and the wall started. That is why I got her to stand against this plain white background in Image 4. Image 4 is the photograph I decided to use for my front cover. I think that I directed my subject well and told her clearly exactly what I wanted her to do in the photos. However, this may be because we are friends and I may have acted differently and less confidently if I was taking photographs with someone I didn’t know. Therefore I need to work on my people skills for the future.



Image 4

 Photoshop

 In Photoshop I used a wide variety of tools to get the various effects I needed. I used the magnetic cutter tool so that I could remove the background from my subject, I then used the feather tool to make her outline look less jiggered and abrupt. I also changed the brightness and contrast of the photograph slightly to make it look better. I used the text tool a lot to get all of my titles and the headlines and I also used the shape tool to get the boxes behind the text. The main tool I used in Photoshop was the blending options; this is how I did all of the different effects on things like my title and how I added gradients and shadows to my background.

I had used Photoshop in the past but not to the advanced level I did this time. I found that altering the blending options was a lot about experimentation and just trying different things until I found something that looked good.

I had never used the magnetic cutter tool to cut out an image before and I think this is something I could work on improving because if you look closely some parts of Abbi’s hair have been lost.

I decided to make my title a bold red colour, I did this because my subject is wearing a red checky t-shirt and I thought that by matching the colours it would make everything come together better. The font I used for my title is “Docteur Atomic” and this is a font I downloaded from DaFont.com I used this font because I thought that the eroded and distorted nature of the font would appeal to the type of people likely to read this magazine. I added many different blending options to the title to make it look the way it does, including “texture overlay”, “inner shadow”, “bevel and emboss” etc. In my opinion he title is the best thing about my magazine because it looks completely unique and unlike anything else.

 I tried to roughly base my magazine design of this front cover from the magazine NME:

NME Cover

 I decided to do this because I believe that the type of people that are likely to read my magazine will be interested in the same type of music that people like from this magazine. And that is why I used the colours red, black, white and yellow. I think these colours all work really well together.

I think the biggest thing I need to work on improving is the overall page structure of my magazine. Because in terms of information I have not included as much as I could; all the headlines are on the left and side of the page and I feel like the magazine would have looked better if I had spread out the text better by making the font size smaller on the less major headlines and then had some text on the right as well as on the left. I also think that using purple on the top headline text box was a mistake, because it simply does not match the rest of the magazine. If I were to do this again I would change it to a red or maybe a yellow.