Technologies

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

The software I used to produce my magazines was Adobe Photoshop, originally I learnt from trial and error before starting the course but my knowledge was still very sketchy and I was not confident performing the most simple of tasks. Since starting the course I have expanded my knowledge of the program using tutorials on the college website, tutorials on YouTube and of course, trial & error.

Shot of the YouTube tutorial I followed to create my titles.

From my experience with it I have come to see how powerful the program is and why it is the standard program in the industry, providing you know how to use them, there are so many tools and functions, effects and renders that can completely change an image and make something fantastic. Even the things that are hard to begin with have solutions hiding in the settings and toolbars, for example when dealing with a lot of text and image effects that "Layers" tab can get very jumbled up and layers can easily get lost, however there are folder and naming tool that can be used to make navigation easier. I also customised the layout of all the toolbars for ease of access to the commonly used functions like the navigator and history tabs that I found very useful. Comparing using Photoshop to creating the documents on paper or with less powerful programs makes one realise how useful the program can be.

I used Blogger to host my work online. I have never used the site before or made a blog so I had no experience of them before starting the course. I found the layouts to be frustrating and the interface, impractical. But as a medium to show my work and evaluations it is fairly good and does the job to a decent standard.

I used Flikr to host my images for storage and annotation purposes. I found it relatively simple but basic issues with the image uploader and site crashing to be very frustrating. The annotations also look ugly and have very little room for text without obstructing the image itself. I had never used Flikr but I had used Photobucket which has a similar layout so I adjusted to Flikr with relative ease. This seems to be the problem with free, internet-based software.