Evaluation of Practice Print Products - Oliver

Evaluation of Print Products

The first of my print products turned out well, however it did have a few elements that could have been changed. The size and colour of the font came out very well, however the whole print product came out landscape instead of portrait and this means it was not done accurately. This is because I did not realise that I could change the type of file I was opening as this was my first time using Photoshop. I have since looked through all the file formats and worked out which are most suited to my products. I have also looked at using transparent and non-transparent backgrounds, so this was a valuable task to learn about Photoshop.

I think the main magazine image came out very well taken as an image by itself and is quite powerful and impactful, but it did not suit the image of a magazine cover as it did not give enough sense of narrative or emotion.  It was also difficult to resize to fill as much of the cover as I would have liked. This is why Katherine and I decided not to continue with this product and to move to a different one. When I create the real magazine cover, I need to take into consideration the purpose of the image I take and also the whole layout of the magazine. One valuable lesson I have learned is that the main photo has to be exactly right and has to be taken with the composition of the whole cover in mind,

Because we decided to change idea as this main image was never going to work, there are lot of things missing from the front of the cover such as more images, teaser text, price tags and a barcode. These are all things that need to be included into the product I make which will be marked. This was left out because of time limitations as much as anything else - we did not have time to mock up two products.

I used  familiar codes and conventions for magazine covers in the first print product. I used a main image and put it in the middle and this is what you would normally see. Also I used a plain light grey background which made the dark image stand out more. The title of the magazine was at the top in the centre and the main image covered some of the title. This is normally what is done for magazine covers and this worked well on my print product. However I do feel that the text could have been a bit bigger and darker.

The second of my print products was a poster for a film we did. The poster I did for this also came out landscape instead of portrait, although this is not necessarily a problem for posters which can work well in both ways. For my real print product, I will be very clear of the format before I start.  There were many things that did work well e.g. the background image and the different layers. I felt that although the background image was very dark and out of context, it did work well with the image I chose from my film.

The second image that I put into the poster was taken from the internet and was a little out of context. I only put this is as it related to the background image and because I could see that there was too much space left in the poster. Also, I wanted to get a feel of using the Photoshop tools and this was easy to do as the second image was very clear and easily adaptable. In the real products, we can’t use found images and will have to create everything ourselves, which will be easier in some ways as we will be able to create the images exactly as we want. However, it was useful to practise extracting an image from its background, as this is the main skill we need and is also the hardest to master. It was useful to learn how to enlarge the image and what tools you can use to do this.

I didn’t use all the traditional codes and conventions from film posters, as I simply wanted to experiment with Photoshop and this was the main point of the task. The background was very different from what you would normally see and the main image is a lot smaller than it would normally be. Also, the main image is to the left side of the cover and is a lot further down nearer the bottom corner of the cover. This makes the main image appear to be a side image and this made the poster less effective. However, I am glad I did the task as I feel much more confident about how Photoshop works and will be able to create a better exam product because of this knowledge.