Creative Evaluation

How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

Construction stages:

For our ancillary tasks, it was important that myself and Ian selected the right software that we were comfortable with using in order for us to achieve high quality, professional products. For our Digipak and Magazine Advert we first attempted to use 'Photo Serif'. We chose to use this as it was convenient and available to us on the school computers. However this programme was hard to maneuver and I found it challenging to achieve the look we had hoped for. Whatever we tried to do, we couldn't achieve properly without hindering the appearance of the product. So we decided against using this software, and looked elsewhere to create our ancillary texts.

Following this, we wanted to use free editing software, as we were both unwilling to download expensive editing programmes that we were unlikely to use again in the future. As a way of handling this, we found 'Picasa' which was a byproduct of Google. I really liked this software, however I found it very basic and was more suited to lightly editing photos and hiding blemishes or merely transforming the image to Black and white or Sepia. 'Picasa' offered little features when it came to editing on a larger scale eg. text, font, colour radius, exposure, tint and contrast, so as a result we strayed from using this. To combat this, we used 'GIMP' however disliked it within half an hour of using it. The software was extremely complex and we did not have the time to teach ourselves how to use it. It was frustrating by this point, as we had not yet found any editing software that we found easy to use, was free and offered a broad variety of features that would enable us to create a polished, professional product.

Ian thankfully found a 30 day free trial on Adobe, this was called 'Photoshop Elements 9'. Photoshop is a prestigious editing software and we were able to use this freely for 30 days which came as a great relief. I found this programme to be extremely easy to use and it offered many features that we were able to use. Photoshop Elements 9 allowed myself and Ian to achieve the high quality ancillary texts that we have and I would certainly use it again if I was in a similar situation.