Mock design of my magazine front cover

Here I experimented with Publisher to play around with its features and I used Photoshop to play around with

manipulating my images. It gave me an idea of how both software's worked and also allowed me to make a ‘mock’ of my magazine front cover so that I could experiment and see

what looked good

Here I was zooming in to use the Spot Healing tool to remove some of spots and imperfection on my models, Dan's, face here. I used the navigator tool bar so that I could zoom in and get closer to the image so that I could be more accurate with removing imperfections.

I concentrated around the mouth as this is where a lot of the red imperfections where. I wanted to remove this in order to make my images look more professional and also more appealing. It is true to say that more images seen on magazine now have been photoshoped to look more ‘perfect’ and ‘airbrushed’ I felt it was important to stick to this rule as it is a key convention of general magazine therefore would also apply to my genre, rock magazines

Gaussian blur

Here I made a background copy so the I would have two layers of the same image. This is important when using the Gaussian Blur effect so that I could add this effect to the top layer, and then use the erased to rub away some of the blurred effect.

Although I used the Spot Healing Tool to remove more prominent imperfections. The Gaussian blur effect helped me to make my image have a ‘soft focus’ look to it. This could make the image less ‘defined’ so I didn’t use a high level of the Gaussian blur as I wanted it to not look too ‘pretty’ with the soft focus look.

However this helped greatly to remove any excess red tones to my models skins and therefore make it look more appealing and attractive. I erased a lot of the Blue effect around my models hair, clothes and jawline so that they would be more defined and stand out as key features to my image here.

Here as you can see, I altered the brightness and contrast to my image. I lowered the brightness a little as thought this would fit in with my magazine much more being ‘dark’ and ‘grunge’ looking as it is a rock magazine. I also made the contrast higher as I felt this made features of my models face stand out a lot more and be more prominent.

Here is come evidence of me using the eraser to remove some Gaussian blur.

Here is some evidence that I used the spot healing brush to edit out imperfections and the red eye removal tool to darken Dan’s eyes

Here I edited the colour balance in order to level out the colours in the main image. I wanted to make it less red in order to make sure the skin was not too red. I added a more ‘blue’ colour level to make the image look a bit more ‘cold’ than ‘warm’ as this would give a dark, edgy look to it rather than a bright, poppy look to it

Here I edited the exposure and I found that too much exposure really did not look appealing. The brightness of his face would not look good in my genre of magazine as generally rock magazine have this persona of ‘dark’ and ‘grunge’ to give a ‘rock star’ look. And this image with a higher level of exposure would not suit my magazine therefore I will not use too much exposure when I edit my final pieces for my magazine.

Here is a cut out of the image I chose to experiment with. On a white background it looks good and quite clear around the edges

Here I put my cut out image on a black background and here it did not look very good and you can see my cutting out isn’t as good as you can see the grey in-between the hair from the background I cut it out from previously. I have learnt from this that I should be more careful with my cutting out

Here I has to align my image to the left hand side as the photograph I took did not have all of Dan's left shoulder in it therefore I had to align it to the left edge of my magazine. This also gave a good effects I thought as it made the image look 3D

Here is where I chose the colour fro my masthead. It was an important thing to as the colour of the masthead is almost a distinctive thing to magazine and is associated with certain magazines. For example the colour red is associated with NME magazine as it is the colour of their masthead

Here is a mock-up of what I would like my front page to look like. I have not included all the key features here and am aware that I need to put those in my final design (like the barcode, a sub-image and text on the bottom) doing a mock plan of what my front page will look like has helped me a lot as I can see it done properly instead of just a drawing. From this I have found some methods I should not do. I will write these in my conclusion. But this also allowed me to experiment with the Publisher software and get used to it.