Skills Development

On my Foundation Portfolio, I did two prelimary tasks which were to create a 'Advert for a Perfume' and front cover, contents page for a 'College Magazine'. These tasks were basically for me to get used to using different programmes such as Photoshop which was completely new to me, I'd never used it before. I then also made front page, contents page and double page spread for a 'Music Magazine' that was completely created by myself. The genre of my music magazine was "Indie so it had to have all the codes and conventions related to "indie". For my artist that was featured on the main front cover, contents page and double page spread was styled in very soft neutral colours with added floral patterns. I wanted to make my artist girly, but by not adding bright colours such as "Hot Pink" it didn't look like a Pop magazine.

Before I started my AS Portfilio I had very average skills of some Microsoft programmes such as PowerPoint, Word and Publisher, these were just used in computer work. I used Microsoft Publisher for making posters and leaflets for example. I had also used very amatur editing programmes such as Picaso Google and Picnik which are very basic and nothing in comparasion to Photoshop. I used these in my spare time just for editing photos of my own etc. I had basic experience of editing photographs for example, the contast, the colour and also cropping.

When I started to use Photoshop I found it difficult at first, because it seemed so different to what I've used before and very complexed. The hardest thing to understand were the different layers you need to keep adding in order to use Photoshop correctly and also keep everything in order so if you go wrong you can easily delete a layer. My favorite tool of Photoshop was 'airbrush' effect you could put on, to make it look like your model had perfect-looking blemish free skin! I did this by using the 'Gaussian Blur', creating a new layer and erasing the effect all over a part from the skin so it looked realisitic. I used this on all of my photographs to ensure that they all look the same. I think this is an very effective tool as it's one of the main conventions of a music magazine. I used this tool because it's one of the main convention for any magazine, it brings the photo from just looking like an ordinary image to looking like a professional photograph.

My skills developed in my foundation Portfolio as I got more used to using Photoshop, I started to experiement more. I would Google or Youtube different effects you could use on the software and try them out, even if it didn't always work, I just needed practice. I really came to terms with cutting an individual out of a image, this was a really useful tool as you could copy and paste it into a different image without the background being there and this sometimes looked very effective, and is one of the main conventions of a magazine. To do this you needed to use the cut tool on Photoshop to carefully cut around the image this took time and patience especially if the image wasn't on a plain background.