By Liam Biglin

What have you learnt about

technologies?

The main technology I had to overcome was Photoshop. For anybody new to editing the prospect of using Photoshop is pretty daunting. I was very similar. At the beginning of the course I had no Photoshop knowledge whatsoever. However I soon picked up a thing or two and before long I had conquered the basics.

I grew in confidence the longer I used the programme and by the time it came to producing our magazine I was keen to show off what I had learned. The first thing I was certain about was the title of my magazine, ChartToppers. However, unsatisfied with the range of fonts available on Photoshop I took to the internet in search of a website that would offer me a wider range. This is when I stumbled across DaFont.

DaFont is a website full of all different kind of fonts some fancy and some simple. It was to be my main source of fonts throughout my magazine. The issue was transporting the fonts from the website to Photoshop. For this I had to type the text I wanted to use into the website and print screen the appropriate font.

I could then paste it onto my magazine from where it would be a case of cropping it and then resizing until I was happy. But I wasn’t quite done. I then had two more issues to tackle; changing the colour of the font and getting rid of the white background.

In order to change the colour of the text I would have to use the paint bucket tool because i had imported the text as an image and not text I was unable to highlight and select a colour. So instead I had the long and daunting task of individual filling each letter. Despite this I feel the results where well worth it.

Finally was to remove the white background left from the printscreen. This was done by using magic eraser. This tool allowed me to simply click on the corresponding white background and it would be removed.

From inserting text to inserting images. First things first, I had to take the picture. The brief stated I needed a minimum of 4 original images. Taking an image seems easy enough but with the lighting and use of white background it proved a little more tricky. To start with I’d make little mistakes such going past the white background and getting the lighting all wrong.

But eventually, like Photoshop, I got the hang of it 4 of the original image I used are shown to the right When I had an image I was happy with I had to fit it into my magazine.

Firstly by using the Quick Selection tool to remove the background, this left me with just the image I wanted. This process was made easy by the use of the white background. Now it was just the case of resizing to fit in with my magazine.

Another tool I used within Photoshop was the blending option. This was used on my double page spread to create a flash effect on the word Bright. This flash was used to shine on the artist this process is shown below.