Photography
When taking the images for my front cover i had the camera on auto focus therefore I did not use any extra features such as zoom or focus rings. In future I can improve on this by using manual focus which means I can be more in control of the focus to ensure that the picture is of good quality and is not blurry. It will also help me to develop my skills of using a camera. By having it on either portrait or landscape it meant that I could easily fit the pictures into my magazine cover exactly how I wanted them. Due to my magazine cover being in portrait, this meant that I had to take my photos in portrait mode. When i first began taking my photos, I did take a couple in landscape mode. However, I soon realised that this would not work for how I want my magazine to look and changed to portrait mode. Some of the images I took were not completely in focus, and there were not any that I could say were completely clear. To improve this, I need to further learn about exactly how to use the camera and how, in the future, I can stop my images from blurring. As I did not use any proffessional lighting to take these pictures, there was little lighting to use to make the pictures look well lit. However, in the future I can use different lighting such as back, side and front to make my images look more proffesional. This will also develop my skills of taking images and using lighting to make them look better. For example; the image below shows how some of the photos I took were not well lit and so in the future I could work to improve on this.
I think that images I took could have been better composed for certain reasons. The eye line is not in the top third of the magazine and so there is quite a significant gap in between my title and the beginning of the head. This may look a little bare and so in future I need to work to keep the eye line in the top third of the magazine. Also, the model does not take up alot of the magazine and so there are alot of gaps to be seen in between stories and other text. Again, in the future I can work to improve this skill to ensure my magazine looks well composed and does not look bare. For the background of the image, I wanted a plain white background so that it did not look to fussy, I wanted a simple and clear background that would be easy to write texts of all colours on.
When handling my model I was able to tell her what I wanted her to do and then she would do what I told her, for example if I told her to smile or put her head to a side I could. However, I was unsure of exactly what I wanted my model to do as I was unsure of the best poses to put on my magazine. This made it difficult to figure out exactly what i wanted her to do. To solve this problem at the time, I tried lots of different poses, and lots of different angles so that when it came to using the images I would have a wide range of choices. In the future, however, I can improve this skill by learning about the different poses and then working out exactly what I want in my images before taking the pictures.
Photoshop
As this was my first time using photoshop this meant that the skills I had were limited. However I did have some basic knowledge and so I used this to the best of my ability and used the skills I had to create my front cover. In order to lighten my image up I used the brightness/contrast tool. As I did not use any lighting when taking my images, they were a little dark and so I used this tool to brighten it up slightly. I used the text tools alot to create the cover stories and the title. I used different colours and fonts to make the text to bright and eye-catching in order to attract the reader. I also placed an image of a barcode onto my magazine and re-sized it to the size that I wanted it to be. The part I found difficult to use, was actually getting used to the different layers and working out how to select and de-select them. However, once I got used to this and how to do it, I was fine using the layers.
I believe that the text on my cover was well controlled because it was well spaced out ensuring that the cover does not look too crowded. However, I do believe that i perhaps could have used more text or larger text because there are some gaps that look bare and could be filled with more stories. Therefore in the future, I can still ensure that the text is well spaced out but I will need to ensure that all spaces are filled.
For this magazine cover, I did not need to cut out any of the images and so I did not use this skill. In the future I could use this skill if I wanted text to running behind my image. I also did not use drop shadows as I did not feel they were neccesary at this point. I used effects on the image to brighten it up and I also used bold on some of the words to make them stand out. I did not need to download any fonts as I felt the ones that were alread installed in Photoshop were ones that I could use for my cover. In the future, I could download fonts if I needed to do so. The colours that I used on my front cover were pinks and purples. The reason I used these colours is because my main target audience is teenage girls ages around 13-17. Stereotypically, pink and purple are popular colours around this target audience.
The improvements that i would make on my front cover is firstly having better quality images to make my cover look more proffessional and also so that the images is easier to see.In order to create better quality images, I would also use lighting to make the images brighter. I would also use more text to close the gaps and make it look less bare. I think the strengths on my front cover is the colour scheme. I think the colours work well together and the target audience will be attracted to the cover and therefore will be more persuaded to buy it. Also, I believe that I have used good key words to persuade the reader to buy them for example 'WIN!' and 'Exclusive!', make the reader feel like they are getting some unique that no-one else will get, by buying the magazine.
