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.