Technologies
Throughout the creation of my magazine pages I had used a number of different technologies, some which were very familiar to me and some which I had not used before and so had to slowly learn. Recent technology has made the task of designing and creating my own music magazine much more simple, especially with free software/websites. The most significant technologies which helped me finish my magazine product were:
A professional image editing software
A website which provides a personal blog free of charge
A website which allows the uploading and annotation of image for free
A collection of user-made fonts which are (mostly) provided for use without asking permission
A basic video editing software, allows the trimming of clips of film and audio
A presentation software, also allows the presentation to be saved in a video format
A slightly more advanced free video editing software, however this does not let you preview audio when editing
Photoshop
What is most likely to be the most important piece of technology that has helped me during the designing process of my magazine. The tools featured in photoshop have really helped me to
achieve more than I could is a more basic program, such as the default Paint. Photoshop features a variety of tools, including smudge (which allows you to blend colours and shapes into each other while making it appear slightly blurred), blur and the magic wand (which allows me to quickly select a large area (regardless of shape) that is of a similar colour (dependant on tolerance). Another useful feature of Photoshop is the fact that it uses a series of layers, which can be laid under or over other layers. Layers can also be edited as a whole with different effects such as gradient overlays, stroke or textures. For example, the font used in the "Scorched" title, was textured with a rocky texture I found online. I then added a few other effects so that some areas were black and other patches were a silver colour. A major disadvantage to photoshop is the fact that it costs a large amount, luckily the college computers have this installed and so I could use the program there. Also, Photoshop file types are usually very large in size, and so it was important that I created JPEG files or PNG files often along with my main photoshop files.
Photoshop
What is most likely to be the most important piece of technology that has helped me during the designing process of my magazine. The tools featured in photoshop have really helped me to
achieve more than I could is a more basic program, such as the default Paint. Photoshop features a variety of tools, including smudge (which allows you to blend colours and shapes into each other while making it appear slightly blurred), blur and the magic wand (which allows me to quickly select a large area (regardless of shape) that is of a similar colour (dependant on tolerance). Another useful feature of Photoshop is the fact that it uses a series of layers, which can be laid under or over other layers. Layers can also be edited as a whole with different effects such as gradient overlays, stroke or textures. For example, the font used in the "Scorched" title, was textured with a rocky texture I found online. I then added a few other effects so that some areas were black and other patches were a silver colour. A major disadvantage to photoshop is the fact that it costs a large amount, luckily the college computers have this installed and so I could use the program there. Also, Photoshop file types are usually very large in size, and so it was important that I created JPEG files or PNG files often along with my main photoshop files.Blogger
add a small something to the work I upload. The label feature also allows me to organise all of my work into categories, so that I can find it much easier. Of course, as with all free sites there are disadvantages, given the fact that I am not actually paying for the use of this site, then the owners have all rights to shut down the site without warning, if and when they want. The v
ariety of ways that you can edit and customise your blog is very useful when it comes to uploading my work, it allows me to use more formats than perhaps other sites would. For example, some areas have used videos or pictures rather than basic text.
Flickr
This site allowed me to upload my images and then annotate specific areas with text. Essentially you drag a rectangular shape over the area and add a note which appears when the mouse is hovered over the specific zone. Like Blogger, this site is also free and so the same disadvantages apply. Although I could upload the pictures directly to Blogger, I preferred for the most part to use Flickr as it allowed for easier annotation.
DaFont
This website helped me throughout and contributed to the final piece, www.dafont.com is essentially a website where users can upload their own fonts which they have created. Others can then download and use these, however, using the college computers meant that we could not install our own custom fonts. Luckily, DaFont had a useful feature in which you can type in some sample text, choose the desired size and then get an image version of what the text would look like. Using this I was able to get the desired font and text, this did mean going into Photoshop and editing out the white areas around the text though.
VideoPad Editor
While creating a video, I noticed that I needed to cut out certain clips from a file. The last time I had used Windows Movie Maker, it was not possible to cut clips from within a film and so I decided to do some research into a useful free video and audio editor, VideoPad was the result of this. VideoPad, while not as useful as more advanced programs such as Sony Vegas, allowed me to edit the video to an extent that I was satisfied with, the only drawback of this software is that the text overlays (or subtitles as they call them) are very limited in position, size and colour.
Microsoft PowerPoint
One particular area where Microsoft PowerPoint proved useful was a compilation of all of my original images for the Magazine, I was able to use 1 image per slide and then use a suitable transition (fade) to progress through the slideshow. Finally, PowerPoint enabled me to add some suiting calm background music to add effect, once this was all completed I was able to save the PowerPoint as a video (which progressed through slides at timed intervals) and upload it directly to my blog.
Wax
This is one of the many video editing software that I looked into, this seemed to the best of those that I had found, however I encountered a problem during playback, after some looking into the problem I had discovered that Wax could not in fact play audio during preview, and so this program was of no use to me, as I needed to cut out both audio and video from the clips I had. Though it did give me the specific timings so I could trim video, I could not hear the audio to find which areas needed to be cut.
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