Q7- Looking Back On Your Preliminary Task, What Do You Feel You Have Learnt In The Progression From It To The Full Product?

By Kate Sutton

Preliminary Task

Looking back on my preliminary task I find my work quite simple, and quite plain. Never having used Photoshop before the cutting out of the model on the two pages looks quite rough and not very smooth on the eye.

For a first time attempt with using Photoshop I am pleased with how both pages turned out, I think that they have most of the aspects of a college magazine I just could have laid it out differently to make it more creative and interesting.

On the preliminary task I had never used Photoshop and needed to get to know the tools individually and find out what it was that they actually do. I only ever managed to crop and image and change the contrast and brightness for this task as I found it very difficult to decided what to adapt on them and how it needed to be done.

I wanted to remove an item of jewellery on the model, and with trial and error I kept getting it wrong and found it very difficult to correct myself. With the main task this was less of a problem as I became more confident with the program and had chance to edit more images in order to gain some experience.

Progression

Going onto the main task, I managed to use Photoshop to edit and manipulate even more images. This enabled me to use trial and error to see which tools worked on creating the kind of image that I wanted to produce and how they were used.

Using Photoshop in the main task also involved editing a lot of different styled images including different lighting aspects and different backgrounds. I learnt how to adapt and delete parts of a background if they were not needed and how to crop the image a lot neater than that of the preliminary task.

I could also go on to experiment with the title and put the models head in front of the masthead rather than behind (again like on the preliminary task).

During the first task, I changed the contrast and brightness of the two images used, but I didn’t know how to change certain specific aspects like removing an item of jewellery for example. On the main task I had to use the clone stamp tool in order to remove a bra strap from a couple of the images involving a female model. I had learnt how to use these tools to improve my work and to make it more professional; this was a big progression over the two pieces as I actually manipulated the image rather than just cropping the model out and changing the brightness and contrast.