Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?

Here are two products I created this year, the first product is my psychedelic music magazine cover and the second is my art magazine cover which I have created for the preliminary task. 

Looking at my preliminary task I can say that my Photoshop skills have improved greatly, due to the fact that I can now manipulate and rasterize text on Photoshop. In comparison to my preliminary task, I have learnt how to cut out images accurately, because on my college magazine I have used an original image for the background without changing the image. There a few similarities in the style of the magazine covers, however there are a lot of differences due to developing Photoshop skills. One of the most important lessons I have learnt this year is the conventional features to magazines. I have learnt how to use different technologies such as picmonkey.com, a website where you can manipulate your images, add certain things and change the effect; I have also learnt how to use Photoshop; other technologies such as dafont.com which helped me a lot to choose a font for my own magazine because the fonts on Photoshop are limited. 

Skills I have acquired from Photoshop:

• Rasterizing text in order to make font look psychedelic 
• Using the magic wand correctly to cut out certain areas 
• Removing backgrounds accurately
• Changing the effect of the image
• Editing faces; such as removing spots and evening out the colour 
• Airbrushing 
• Adding additional features to text

I have learnt where you would put conventional features on your magazine correctly by looking at other major music magazines. I have learnt where to place cover lines, a splash, a sky line and etc. For example on  my preliminary task there are too many cover lines and they take away the attention from the main image and don't exactly look neat. On my music magazine front cover the cover lines are down one side of the magazine (the idea I've got from a Shindig issue) that in my opinion looks a lot better in comparison to having cover lines down both sides of the magazine cover. The main two cover lines on my music magazine are in bold and stand out, which is better to have on a magazine. I didn't use a sky line on my preliminary task, but I used one on my music magazine cover, it's very conventional for a magazine of any kind to have a sky line, either at the top or at the bottom of the page. 

What I would have changed if I could on my preliminary task: 

If i got the chance to change my preliminary task to make it better I would focus mainly on the conventional features for a magazine, such as placing a sky line, using the same image but cutting out the background and using a background that would associate with art a bit more. I would also change the cover lines a little bit, make the most important ones stand out and the rest a bit smaller. Understanding Photoshop has greatly improved my music magazine which is why if I did this again I would have done a better job, with being able to access a lot more areas on Photoshop.