Reflecting on My Construction

Magazine Cover

I composed and manipulated the main photo for the front cover well. I understood that the photographer should move the 'models' to how the photographer wants but what I wanted was a natural shot to make the photo look as natural as possible. The photo itself was taken in a Food Technology class during a practical, the boy in the photo was talking to a friend during this take and he laughed which is what I wanted my intended photo to show; a natural smile to portray enjoyment. Keeping in mind that this magazine will include anchorage texts on the side I made the majority of my photographs portrait and made sure the person in shot is to the side. Normally magazines have the person on the cover looking directly at the camera, the boy in my magazine is looking away from the reader and is instead looking at his pan of pasta, this directs the readers to what he has in his hands and will recognise the magazine as a school of cookery.

When taking the photo the context was easily recognisable as a cooking class because of the environment it was taken in. Ovens, stoves, posters of food and aprons are all in the photographs. Despite having the photo I wanted I noticed that there are a lot of objects and posters with text in the background which when putting text above the photo will become confusing for the reader to distinguish the actual magazine text from the background text. I will take the background into consideration when taking my next photograph.

So what I did to fix this was that I selected the whole background using the Lasso Tool whilst excluding the boy so the only area that will be affected by the editing will be the selected area. After the selection-making I wanted it to be more accurate, to achieve this I zoomed in at the smaller details which I missed during the initial selecting, if I were to miss the smaller details it would make the photo look uneven.
Next I used the Blur tool at its highest strength so everything in the selected area will appear distorted and objects will appear less distinct, I also decreased it's opacity so that the boy in the photo will stand out and be the main image for readers to concentrate on.
To make the boystand out even more I toggled the Saturation tool to make the background desaturated (lose colour) and saturated the colour of the boy.

Despite being happy with the conclusion the anchorage text could be improved. The reason for this is because it seems too similar to the Masthead and banner when it should look different.

I had used the time I had during Media lessons to continue working on the front cover and since I have my own copy of Photoshop at home I used my free time to find the right font for the Masthead.
However, at some point within working on the front cover and contents page with the school's Adobe Photoshop programme and my Adobe Photoshop Elements it had made the .PSD file unable to open on either programmes. This has made me more cautious about my work and I have decided from now on to save a copy of my work as a .JPEG file after every editing session, that way I can always make sure to have a back-up file of my work in case this were to happen again.

My favourite subject has always been Art and I've spent a lot of time on my computer at home, having these two traits it seemed to be a necessity to have my own Adobe Photoshop programme. I've become accustomed to it's tools and photo manipulation effects after many experiences with the programme at home and at school. The following effects I used on my original photo for the front cover were:

• Lasso tool
• Selection Brush tool
• Blur tool
• Saturation/Desaturation tool
• Brighten tool
• Decreasing opacity in the Layers tab