In order to make my magazine look professional, it was vital that I used the right editing software. However, first I needed to use technology to ensure I had the components for my magazine. To begin with, I used a Lumix G6 to take my photos with. I used this camera to make sure that the picture were good quality and focused properly. This is important because using bad quality images is not something that is seen in magazine unless done deliberately, or if it’s a paparazzi picture that has been used in a gossip magazine. NRS states that more gossip magazine are bought by people who are C2DE than ABC1, and as my target audience are ABC1, it would go against what they are attracted to use blurring or paparazzi style photos. Also, as my target audience like a clean, professional, minimalistic look, it was vital that my images were well taken. Through this I’ve learnt that image quality connotes different things to different audiences, and in some cases is completely necessary and is fine to be used.

Technology I used throughout making and editing
 

Once the images were taken, I needed to edit them. Initially, I wanted them to appear polished and completely perfect, but as I looked over my target audience I realised that they were lovers of modern and minimalistic, however were loyal to tradition and safety. For this reason I decided to make my images appear clean and not too airbrushed so that they would be representative of the model and her music, rather than the model and her looks. To show this, I didn’t use any airbrush features, and the only way I edited the model was by brightening her eyes in the image used for the double page spread.

When editing my images, I found that online editing websites such as PicMonkey and Pixlr only have filters that are very warm toned and strong. They didn’t look very crisp and sophisticated, and I didn’t think my target audience would like them at all. This left me in a difficult situation because now I didn’t know where to find filters that would be suitable. Because this wasn’t what I thought would appeal to my target audience, I exported the images to my phone and edited them on an app called VSCOcam, which allowed me to choose more subtle filters, and then alter the strength of them. After that I upped the saturation because it made the colours more vibrant, but it also made the picture more yellow toned. This wasn’t what I was aiming for because I wanted the images to not look warm toned, as colder tones make images look sharper and cleaner. To fix this I lowered the temperature of the images which made them have a much more ‘blue’ tone to them. I did this to all of the images so that they all have a similar appearance and looked like they correlated to the feature, as they were all of the same artist and should show continuity so they don’t look out of place and all fit together. In order to maintain the high quality of the pictures I exported them out of VSCOcam at the highest resolution possible. This worked really well, which surprised me because I thought that using an app would make it less professional, but when looking at the pictures you can’t actually tell because the quality has not diminished.

After this I needed to add the writing. I used PicMonkey for this. First, I downloaded the fonts that I had chosen onto my laptop via DaFont. I found this website really useful as it allowed you to enter what you would type in the font into the website so you can see a preview of what it would look like. I downloaded 3 fonts, RedVelvet, Chapaza and Chapaza Italic. Downloading these was quick and easy. I used these to write on the images, and then altered the colours so that they appealed to my target audience. I took inspiration of where to change font colour and where to change font form covers of Vogue, as they change fonts and colours seamlessly.

Then I realised that it was difficult to add a barcode and be able to position it where I wanted on the cover, so I saved the image and then put it on PowerPoint so that I could quickly add the barcode in the correct place. Then I saved the slide as a JPEG and the cover, double page spread and contents page were finished. Overall, the battle between Pixlr and PicMonkey was easy for me – PicMonkey was the clear winner. I checked them both out to see what I felt was easiest to use, had the most choice of editing techniques and edited everything to a very high standard. PicMonkey ticked all the boxes, so therefore it is what I used for the main bulk of my editing.