Evaluation Question 6 - Technologies

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

In the construction of this finished product i have used multiple programs and websites which i had to learn to use effectively in order to produce a proffessional, attractive and realistic set of magazine pages which would attract my target audience.

    In the construction of my magazine pages i used:

• Adobe Photoshop cs4/5
• Blogger.com
• Flickr.com

All of these applications were extremely helpfull towards the creation of my final product but above all photoshop was the most useful.

     Photoshop supplied me with a large range of tools which helped me to create textures, to blend images and to aesthetically enhance my products, tools such as the outer glow tool, which allows the user to create a glow around an image to make it stand out from the background. This was one of the tools i used very often because the band was wearing dark clothing to fit the demographic of my audience, however this caused them to blend into the background of the magazine, making them harder to see, this tool allowed me to fix this tool quickly and smoothly. There are hundreds of different tools which help you to carry out these small editing features which may take you longer if you do it the simple way, an experienced user of Adobe Photoshop would take alot less time to create the same product as a novice of Photoshop. However some of the computers at college had cs5 and some had cs4, this was a disadvantage because the layout of some keys are different, so some keys that you have previously familiarised yourself with last lesson might not be available to you the next lesson which was a setback.

    Blogger.com is a useful website which allows users to add small amounts of imformation to a large data bank which they can customise themselves, this helps alot with the production of essays and evaluations because then wherever you have internet access you can add to your work part by part. This helps alot with gaining marks with the use of images and embedding videos into work, it also allows the user to edit saved information if they have new ideas or if they need to correct mistakes. The only problem i have found with this website is that if you dont track your progress and file your work properly it can become a big mess which can take a long time to sort out, and it will cause you to get lost in your own work, especially if you dont label your work properly.

     Flickr is a very similar website to blogger except this website is focused on the uploading and sorting of images, this website allows you to upload JPEG images onto the website and edit them with notes and annotations, these images have options for sharing with blogs which creates a very usefull link between my work with Flickr and Blogger. This website has similar problems to Blogger where if you dont label or file your photos correctly it can become a big mess, however this website has a possibility of creating sets of photos which allow you to seperate you work into different sections.