Photoshop

In preparation for my music magazine production task, I have familiarised myself with Photoshop. Photoshop is an Adobe System which allows you to edit photos, and will be important I this task as Photoshop is often use to edit photos in the magazine industry, s learning Photoshop will help to authenticate my product.

These first two images I have used a simple crop tool on. The crop tool, while simple, will be useful in the production of my blog, as it will allow me to better centre photographs on what I think I important.

On the two picture above, I have edited the lighting to make the footballers more clearly visible, again this will be useful if any of the photographs I want to use are not as clearly visible as possible

On the images above I used the spot healing tool in order to airbrush the photo and make it look more appealing to the reader. Airbrushing inparticular is extremely prominent in music and fashion magazines, so its important that I learn to use this tool as convincingly as possible, fortunately I found the tool fairly easy to use.

Finnaly, I used the clone stamp tool on the images above to remove all the bottles on the shelf except one. Like the spot healing tool, this will be useful in removing any objects I don't want in a picture to get the exact image I want. Also like the spot healing tool, this tool replaces any unwanted images with replications of the background, so when using it I had to be careful and use various diffrent areas of the background when altering the image to prevent the background from reapeating itself which would look unnatural and unauthentic.

Questionnaire

About me

Before I begin research or planning I’d like make a post about some of my favourite trailers, music videos, etc. , to give insight into the type of media I enjoy.

This first link is to the music video for ‘Melancholy Hill’ by the Gorillaz. The Gorillaz are one of my favourite artists partly due to their heavy emphasis on the fictional characters and animation outside the music, and the Gorillaz music videos reflect that well. I also like how their music videos chronologically transition to one another, creating sort of an over-arching storyline, as this one does after their previous music video for 'Stylo'. But as it stands on its own, 'Melancholy Hill' is still one of my favourite Gorillaz songs and my favourite of their music videos.
 

The second link is to a trailer for the film ‘Only God Forgives’ which was released in cinemas not too long ago. I haven’t seen the film yet but I love this trailer, due to the surreal vibe it gives by combining the violent visuals with oddly gentle music, as well as the art-house style in general.

A video game that I recently discovered and particularly enjoy is ‘Dark Souls’ for the PS3 and Xbox 360.  It is a role playing game (RPG) that is unconventional in that it has more of an emphasis on actual gameplay than a deep story. I also like its creative art design which gives it plenty of atmosphere despite the lack of dialogue, and harsh but rewarding difficulty which is uncommon in the modern gaming industry.

http://www.metacritic.com/
The third link is to  the website 'metacritic' that I frequently visit. It offers reviews on films, TV shows, games and music, and similar to the website 'rotten tomatoes' each score is determined by the average score it is getting from other reviewers of the given medium, meaning it gives a general consensus from critics.

By posting this I hope I have given a little more insight into the genres and styles of media I enjoy, which may reflect in my work

Introduction

This is my AS media blog. During this cource I will produce a front page, contents page and double page spread for my preliminary school newpaper , aswell as a front page, contents page and double page spread for a music magazine. All of these items, as well as any reaserch and planning or other tasks will be posted to this blog.