Evaluation – Part 6What have you learnt about new technologies

from the process of creating this product?

Photoshop & InDesignWhile creating my media product, I came across two pieces of software that I previously had very little or no experience using. These two pieces of software were Adobe Photoshop and Adobe InDesign, and they both helped me create my magazine.

Adobe Photoshop is used around the world in many different professions to manipulate and edit images, which is exactly what I used it for. I used Photoshop to edit all of my photographs and create a few smaller images that I used in my product. I have learned how to use the abundance of tools and image manipulation techniques that are available on this software in order to make even a bad photo look good and professional. Some of these tools and techniques include removing backgrounds effectively, adjusting the brightness and lighting on images, changing the textures of certain parts of the image (clothing, for example) and making two completely different images look like they were taken in the same shoot or location.

Since I used Photoshop for all photo manipulation, I used Adobe InDesign for putting together my media product. Not as widely used as Photoshop, I had absolutely no idea where to start with InDesign. It was actually rather easy to get to grips with, and once I had gotten used to it I began creating my magazine. The major tools that allowed me to do this included being able to create image and text box frames to show the size and placing of an image without having to put the image itself in. This allowed me to change the way my magazine was structured and built up without having to put the images and text in, so I could still see roughly what my product would look like by using the “skeleton” created by the frames of these boxes.

Blogger, Prezi, Slideshare, Soundcloud etc….

In order to present my work, I used Blogger to upload everything that I did, as I did it. Blogger is very easy to use as it allowed me to upload my work whenever I needed to, in the simplest form possible. It also allowed me to upload files and presentations from other websites, which I will talk about later, allowing me to vary my methods of presentations extremely easily.

I used Prezi as a different form of presentation when uploading my work to Blogger. Prezi is a free presentation creating website that allows anyone to create professional and exciting presentations to grab the attention of their audience. The tools that this website provides allows for extremely fluid slides, and generally gives the user a lot more opportunities to make their work look more professional.

Slideshare is another free website that, after creating an account, allows users to upload their PowerPoint Presentations for anyone to see. This also gives the option to copy the embed code of posts, so the presentations can be embedded into other websites, such as Blogger. This made it easy to include a presentation in a blog post, giving me anothr way to vary my methods of presentation.

For the podcasts that I created earlier on in the course, I used a very useful audio sharing website called Soundcloud. Soundcloud works almost exactly like Slideshare as users can upload audio files for anyone to listen to. The embed code option is available also.