Practise Cover and Contents Page

Before starting on our main magazine cover, Sophie set us the task of taking images and using photoshop to create ourselves a mock "Zine" cover and contents page. This would then highlight the areas on photoshop that we are weak and also where we are strong.

This is an image of Willem Defoe that I used as a practise image on photoshop, the aim was not to make a good image but to play around with photoshop and get used to the tools, as you can see i added alot of zips to his face, i used the clone tool alot because i liked the effect of it and i think that if i could incorporate this tool into my main magazine it would look good.

This is my practise "Zine" cover

It is very basic, this is because i was so far into the editting process, that photoshop would not let me edit the whole image and add in a background, however i feel the cover is not too boring.

I used the image of my friend as he has a nice cheeky smile that is very inviting, this fits in with the theme i wanted for the magazine, the theme of "welcome"

However my friend is no "posterboy" so i decided to edit the image using the blur tool, this would then keep his face the same colour but get rid of his freckles and spots.

To make my image not so rough around the edges i used the airbrush tools at different sizes to blend the image to the background.

To make the image more crisp i played around with colour levels etc.

I then moved on to my contents page, unfortunately i didn't take many of my own images so i borrowed some off a friend, this image was one of them, i chose it as the "Zine" magazine is aimed at Woking students and this is a shot of the skate park not far from the college.

To change the image i decided to make it black and white, this would also blend the colours of the background and not leave any contrasting colours.

However when loading the image onto another photoshop, the black and white effect wasn't loaded so i changed to the charcoal effect which gives a similar image.

I used the gold writing to stand out from the black and white making the page easier to read.

When making my final cover and contents i will aim towards making conventions for my magazine and sticking to those themes throughout, i might stick to a single image on the front cover as this makes it simple but the image needs to be good and filling. I will also work better on a background for the front cover, as a single colour does not look that good, and i will also work better on making the contents page look more professional.