Exam Question: Digital Technology

Throughout the process of creating my AS and my A2 media products I have learnt how to use different tools to edit and create my magazines that helped to make it look like it was done by professionals and look like a product that would actually sell.
When I had to do the prelim task for my AS media project I had no previous experience with using Photoshop or with using an Apple Mac computer which meant that I had to try and learn the skills as I went on which took a lot of time and required me restarting a lot because I did not get a finished looking result.
I believe that my lack of experience with Photoshop is the reason why my prelim task did not come out as well as the image that I had of how it would look like as a finished product.
As I learnt the skills I became a bit better at working on Photoshop and taking advantage of technology available to help me produce my research and my final product. To gain results for a survey that I needed to do I used a website called survey monkey on which you can create free surveys and I then posted these onto Facebook to get the results from my target audience. I did this for both my AS and A2 projects because it produced good results and it was a fast and effective way of gathering results and the website puts them into tables for you which means it saved me a lot of work.
I used Prezi to present some of my findings from research so that it added some variety on how I presented the work that I did this helped to show the examiner that I can use various tools and internet resources to present my work differently. I also had to learn how to use a high spec camera the Cannon 6D to get good quality images for my magazines so that they turned out well after being edited and could be stretched. It was hard to do my editing in my music magazine because I did not know how to delete the background off images properly so my star vehicle ended up looking rough around the edges, which made my magazine look quite unprofessional. For my A2 project I improved a lot on using the technology available to the best of my advantage I used the Cannon 5D camera to go out and get landscape images for my regional magazine for Cornwall and because I gained a lot of experience in using Photoshop I managed to manipulate my images and make the text be in a layout and colour that complimented the images that I used instead of over powering them and I now knew how to edit the image itself to help make the colours more intense and make the image stand out more making my target audience more likely to notice the magazine.
Having the access to the internet was very useful when creating the magazines because I could find a wide variety of already existing magazines online and I could pick out aspects from the that I liked and aspects from them that I did not want in my own magazine but it also meant that I could look at a magazine and use it as a style model on the computer while I am creating mine on Photoshop.