Skills development

When I started my foundation portfolio I already had a little experience using Photoshop and other editing software, I learnt media studies at school and gained 4 A grades from the subject by using the skills I had learnt in Photoshop. The knowledge I already had using the software helped a lot when I started the AS media course because I had to create a magazine cover, contents page and double page spread for my foundation portfolio. For this project I had to use my own original photographs, I had to take numerous photographs and a final one for the front cover; I then edited my photographs and created my magazine using Photoshop. Over the weeks creating the magazine I became more familiar with the tools on Photoshop which helped me to create better looking images as my skills became more advanced. My cover photograph had 3 models; the photograph had to be a medium close up and show a connection with the audience, I took a lot of images of the 3 girls and chose the one that I thought was best for the cover. I researched a lot of different magazines of the same genre to get information and ideas about the codes and conventions of this genre, the genre of the magazine I chose was ‘indie’ focusing on an audience who were fans of artists like ‘Ben Howard’ and ‘Lana Del Ray’. A big inspiration for my magazine was the ‘NME’ magazine as it also focuses on the same audience. I used the conventions of other magazines sold in shops like, barcodes, titles, photographs, mast heads, skylines etc. to make my magazine look like many of the other magazines sold in shops, the price of my magazine was £2.30, when researching other magazines I realised that this price was right for my target audience.  

As a group we were all shown different tools and editing techniques on Photoshop, this was really useful to me as I learnt a lot about using Photoshop in that one lesson and I used a lot of the things I learnt on my photographs throughout the whole of my AS year, we were shown how to get rid of blemishes on the models skin using tools like the ‘spot healing tool’ and also how to create more of a porcelain looking skin by using the layer tool. We were also shown how to create different effects on the text for the magazine; I created a shattered effect on a heading for the context page using different effects on Photoshop.

The first piece of work I created using Photoshop was a college magazine, looking back at the piece it didn’t look very good as I only knew a little about using Photoshop, as the year went on I developed more skills which made me a lot more confident when creating the music magazine, I think that if I was to do another task like this the media text would look a lot better as I would be able to put all of my skills together rather than add them as I had picked them up.

I hope that the skills I learnt last year will help me in creating my A2 portfolio; I have chosen to create a music video but when creating the cover for the album I will need to take appropriate pictures and edit them for my album cover.