AS Media Studies Foundation Portfolio Evaluation

Final Double Page Spread

Final Contents Page

Final Front Cover

Creating My Double Page Spread

 Original Image:                                 Photoshop Image:

First Side of the Double Page Spread (Left Side-A4):

Before, I could start to create my double page spread; I had to create a plain Photoshop A4 Page. To create this, I had to open Photoshop and go to file 'new' and then click international paper and then click A4. The size that I wanted to make my double page spread was A4 I did this to conform the codes and conventions of a magazine. Once I had opened the plain document, I had to open the image that I wanted to use as the cover of my magazine. To insert the image, I had to go to file>Open and then locate to the image that I wanted to use. I decided to use one whole image for one side of my double page spread so that the reader could just focus on this image without there being lots of text on the page, which would distract them from focusing on the image. I have also decided to put all of the text on the other side of the double page spread.

When I opened my image I noticed that the colour of the lighting on the image doesn't look very effective, the lighting was too bright and didn't allow the models face to stand out very much, which wouldn't be very effective in trying to catch the readers eye, so I decided to add a colour overlay to my image. To add this I inserted a shape and drew it over the whole image and chose the colour that I wanted. As I didn't just want a block colour as my main image, I needed to lower the opacity of this shape/colour so that you could see the actual image. After I added this colour, as you can see the model stands out a lot more and doesn't look as bright (see image above).

I then added a brightness/contrast layer; I did this by going to the toolbar underneath the layers and going to "Brightness/Contrast". This allowed me to adjust the brightness of my model to make her stand out more. 

I then added a "Levels" layer to my double page spread. I used the Levels adjustment to correct the tonal range and colour balance of an image by adjusting intensity levels of image shadows, mid tones, and highlights of my double page spread. To add levels to my double page spread, I had to go to the toolbar underneath the layers and go to adjustment layers and then to "Levels". I adjusted the colour of my image by making it a lot brighter as I didn't just want the colour overlay that I previously added to be the colour of the background on the double page spread. As you can see in the image above, the levels changed the whole colour of the background, which is convenient because the lighting is now the same colour as the image used on the front cover which makes it easy for the reader to recognise the image.

I then added multiple colours into my image on top of the levels layer, this was to add a professional looking effect to my image. I went to the toolbar at the bottom of my screen>curves. Curves allows you to adjust tones of the image, to brighten and darken, add contrast  to your image as well as allowing you to add shift colours to your image. Curves consist of three colours of which you can add to your image (Red, Green and Blue). Again, following on from the front cover, I added blue and red to my image and a little bit of green to ensure the image wasn't too bright. I also had to do this as this was what I did for the effect on my other images and I need to keep to a particular house style throughout my magazine. To do this I chose the colour>Channel>Red>Input (Made it brighter)>Output (lowered the brightness). I had to do this for all three colours.

I decided to add a 'Bokeh effect' to my image. This was very beneficial for me as it helped me develop my skills on Photoshop as this effect is something that I have never done before using Photoshop. To add the bokeh effect I clicked on the brush tool and went to layers>create new layer. I then chose a foreground colour (which was pink to keep a consistent house style throughout my magazine). I then added different size circles all over the page. Once I had added all of the circles that I wanted, I went to Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur, this blurred the circles so that they didn't stand out too much, although they did still stand out, they still allowed the main image to be the main focus of the contents page. The next step I took was to add a Photo Filter Adjustment Layer at the top of all of my layers. The final step that I took was to add brightness and contrast effect. (see image above to see the bokeh effect). This helped me improve the background of my image as well as improve my Photoshop skills as this is a skill that I have never used on Photoshop before. Using this effect also makes my magazine unique as not many magazines use this effect as most POP magazines focus on a white background but this effect will ensure my magazine stands out against other POP magazine targeted at the same audience (females aged 15-19).

I then added the content to the first side of my double page spread, which was a Headline and quote with a page number in the corner. 

Second Side of the Double Page Spread (Right Side-A4):

Now that I have finished completing the first half of my double page spread, I can move onto the other half which contains the artists interview.

Firstly, when I designed the first draft of my double page spread, I decided that I wanted 3 images to go along the top of my double page spread, however, I wanted these images to be black and white images so that the main image could still stand out even if there were other images on the page. In order to add these 3 images to the page I had to open up the image I wanted>Use the quick selection tool to 'crop' around the image (which can be seen in the dotted lines in the print screen above). The images that I used had already been taken in black and white on the camera, so I did not have to convert these to black and white images.

 Once I had selected the part of the image that I wanted to crop, I used the 'move tool' on the toolbar on the side of my screen to move image from to a plain A4 Photoshop page. ( I had to do this for all 3 images).

 Once, I had cropped and moved all of the images that I wanted to use to the plain A4 Photoshop page, I had to re-size them by holding down "ctrl-t" on my keyboard and I made all of the images the same size and moved them to the top of my page.

One of the pieces of feedback that I got for my second draft was to add something colourful between the images and the text. I decided to add 3 colourful lines to match the colour scheme of my magazine. To add these I added a new layer to my magazine>went to the toolbar on the side of my page>clicked 'line'>I chose my foreground colour to be pink and drew the line on page (I did this for all three lines, which are situated underneath the three images).

I then added one layer of curves to my double page spread.  I went to the toolbar at the bottom of my screen>curves. Curves allows you to adjust tones of the image, to brighten and darken, add contrast  to your image as well as allowing you to add shift colours to your image. Curves consist of three colours of which you can add to your image (Red, Green and Blue). This was because I done it to one side of my double page spread so I had to do it to this side otherwise the lighting and colours of the images would not be the same.

 Now that I have added all of the effects that I wanted to my image, I could add the content. I used 'Tajan Pro' At the beginning of the interview to introduce the artist. I did this by using the 'T' on the toolbar on the side of my page. I decided that I wanted to make the artists name pink so that the reader was aware of who is features on the page, to do this, I highlighted the name and changes the foreground colour to pink.

I then added the interview to my page, using the "T" tool. I decided to have the questions in pink and the answers in black so that it was easy to identify the difference between a question and the answer. 

I decided to have the main quote that I used in the interview in "Italics Bold" as this is the quote that I used on the headline on the front cover of my magazine, so it needs to stand out within the interview on the Double Page Spread. To do this, I highlighted the text and went to the toolbar at the top of my page and where it said 'Style' I clicked Italic Bold.

Finally, I added the Bokeh effect, to add the bokeh effect I clicked on the brush tool and went to layers>create new layer. I then added different size circles all over the page. Once I had added all of the circles that I wanted, I went to Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur, this blurred the circles so that they didn't stand out too much, although they did still stand out, they still allowed the main image to be the main focus of the Double Page Spread. (I also done this on my contents page, which can be found under the title “creating my contents page”).

Putting my double page spread together (A3 Page):

However, although I had now finished creating my Double Page spread, they were on two separate A4, therefore I needed to save both of the documents as two "JPEG" images and transfer them to a new A3 document.

To open a new A3 page, I had to go to 'file at the top of my page' and go to 'new'.

I then chose the requirements for the page, which was international paper, A4. I then opened this and inserted the two A4 images that I previously saved and this created my double page spread, which can be found under the title (Final Double Page Spread).

Creating My Contents Page

Original Image:                             Photoshop Image:

The steps that I took using Photoshop to create my front cover:

Before, I could start to create my front cover; I had to create a plain Photoshop A4 Page. To create this, I had to open Photoshop and go to file 'new' and then click international paper and then click A4. The size that I wanted to make my was front cover A4, to conform the codes and conventions of a magazine. Once I had opened the plain document, I had to open the image that I wanted to use as the cover of my magazine. To insert the image, I had to go to file>Open and then locate to the image that i wanted to use.

Now that I had opened the image, I could start to create my front cover. This first thing I noticed when I opened my image was that the colour of the lighting on the image doesn't look very effective, so I decided to add a colour overlay to my image. To add this I inserted a shape and drew it over the whole image and chose the colour that I wanted. As I didn't just want a block colour as my main image, I needed to lower the opacity of this shape/colour so that you could see the actual image. The image didn't look bright enough and the model didn't stand out from the background, so adding another colour to the image helped with this.

After I added another colour, I needed to make the model a little bit brighter. To do this I went to the toolbar and clicked brightness and contrast, and this allowed me to make the model to stand out a bit more.

I then wanted to change the lighting of the background, to make the background a different colour to the lighting on the model as when I added a colour over it, everything faded into that colour. In order to change the colour of the background, I first had to change the colour of the whole image. I decided to make the whole image black and white. To make the image black and white I went to the toolbar below the layers that I am using on Photoshop and clicked on the circle symbol and clicked black and white and this made the whole image black and white. As I only wanted to change the lighting of the background and not the actual main image of my magazine, on the black and white layer, I went to the erase tool on the toolbar on the side of the screen and rubbed out the black and white layer of the model making sure that I kept the background black and white. This ensured that the image stood out against the background of the image as in the original image the lighting where the image was taken did not make the model stand out against the background. This also kept my magazine consistent from the front cover as I added the exact same effect to the image on the front cover of my magazine. This also helped in making sure the model was always the main focus of the image.

I then added multiple colours into my image to add a professional looking effect to my image. I went to the toolbar at the bottom of my screen>curves. Curves allows you to adjust tones of the image, to brighten and darken, add contrast  to your image as well as allowing you to add shift colours to your image. Curves consist of three colours of which you can add to your image (Red, Green and Blue). Again, following on from the front cover, I added mostly blue and red to my image and a little bit of green to ensure the image wasn't too bright. To do this I chose the colour>Channel>Red>Input (Made it brighter)>Output (lowered the brightness). I had to do this for all three colours.

I added one more brightness and contrast layer to my image, to ensure the image stands out against the background.

When I looked at my image, I realised that I needed to add something into the background of it to make it stand out a little bit more and add more of an effect to the page. I decided to add a 'Bokeh effect' to my image. This was very beneficial for me as it helped me develop my skills on Photoshop as this effect is something that I have never done before using Photoshop. To add the bokeh effect I clicked on the brush tool and went to layers>create new layer. I then chose a foreground colour (which was pink to keep a consistent house style throughout my magazine). I then added different size circles all over the page. Once I had added all of the circles that I wanted, I went to Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur, this blurred the circles so that they didn't stand out too much, although they did still stand out, they still allowed the main image to be the main focus of the contents page. The next step I took was to add a Photo Filter Adjustment Layer at the top of all of my layers. The final step that I took was to add a brightness and contrast effect. (see image above to see the bokeh effect).

Now that I have added all of the effects that I wanted to my image, I could start to add all of the content to my magazine, following to codes and conventions of a contents page. I first added a pink shape by going to shape>drawing the shape>rotating it so that it went over the corner of the top of the page. I wanted this to be a unique style for my particular magazine, I added text over the shape, in the font 'Trajan Pro'. I used this font because this piece of text had to be different from the rest of the page and had to tell the audience that this was the contents page and they would be able to recognise this.

The next thing convention that I added to my contents page was the page numbers, which are a very important convention of a content page as these allow the audience/reader to find the page in the magazine to find what they are looking for. Again, these are an element of the magazine that had to stand out from the rest of the page so I decided to make the font of them pink, which allows them to stand out from the black text and will be the first thing that the reader looks at. To add the page numbers, I went to the 'T' on the toolbar on the left side of my screen and clicked on the area where I wanted the page number to go and I did this for every page number. 

I then decided to add headings to section out my contents page into categories. This makes it easier for the reader to find what they are looking for if they are looking for a particular section of the magazine. For example, if they wanted to find a page that featured on the cover of the magazine, they could go to 'cover stories'. Again, this had to be in bold bright font to stand out to the reader.

Now that I have added the majority of conventions to my magazine, I could add the final pieces of content. I had to add what was on every page of the magazine. For this, I decided to explain in 2/3 words what is going to feature in the page, so that the reader wouldn't have to read to whole description next to that particular page number. I then added the rest of the description of that page in a smaller font that didn't stand out as much. To make the most important pieces of text bold, I went to the layer that the text was on and highlighted it and click the 'B' on the toolbar at the top of my screen.