5. Previous Experience on Canva / Photoshop

I have upload the practical activities I have completed in Media using canva and/or photoshop, since the start of year one can all act as to help as planning and research tasks for my NEA.

During the first year of A-level media we tried different ways of making products like magazines front cover, newspaper front covers and removing backgrounds on images to help gain more of a understanding of apps like canva and photoshop, as these resources could help my media NEA. These tasks helped me form a basic understanding of the apps, and have a bit of trial and error / experimenting to depend my knowledge

For one of the first tasks I had to replicate a magazine from a selection I was given.

I was practicing my skills and attention to detail needed to make a copy look good. 

With the restrictions of needing to find my own image for my replica cover  and change the wording of the cover lines.

I used canva to produce this mock magazine front cover, with inspiration from the magazine 'Billboard'.

Additionally I used photoshop on the side of this to help.

From this activity I learnt how to remove the background from the main subject, how to edit the layers to bring the main subject over the masthead and I slightly edited the image but increasing the brightness as well.

This skills are going to transferable to my NEA as for the magazine these skills may be needed when putting together the front page, for example, needing to edit the lighting from a photoshoot, or removing things that have accidentally appeared in the background.

The second task I completed was similar to the first magazine front cover design task we had.

The aim was to replicate the overall composition of the cover lines, where they are placed, their design, their colours, their sizing etc...

This task helps to understand how to:

1) set up Photoshop files

2) embed images

3) use the 'character and paragraph' toggle to manipulate copy

For this magazine front cover I used photoshop to produce it instead on canva to broaden my knowledge.

These skills will give me the tools to design a front cover page for the Media NEA and it gives me a better understanding on where to place elements of a magazine on the front cover and will help when designing the content pages.

Then for this task I used photoshop to practice removing the background from a main subject manually.

To create this final image on photoshop, I began with placing a bright coloured layer under the layer that had the image of main subject (Harry Styles) on. Then I went onto the 'remove tool' (found on the left hand side) and went around my subject removing the background. Due to having a brightly colour background on another layer beneath, this the highlighted where I would be removing.