CF: Music festival poster + Reflection

Music festival poster reflection

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2. Reflect on your use of Photoshop. How does it enable creativity? What were the challenges? How did you overcome them?

Photoshop enables creativity in a countless amount of ways. The features of the software which most allow the user to be completely original and creative is the use of layers, which allow the user to mix already existing images or forms of media, or create news ones such as text or pictures.
One aspect of the software that I had difficulty with was being able to cut away the background from images I imported onto the background that I wanted. I overcame this by using Photoshop’s troubleshooting feature, which led me to the magic wand, which was completely effective at selecting the background of the imported images, without selecting any of the part of the image that I wanted, this saved me a great deal of time, and resulted in the images I modified, looking original and professional.

3. List techniques used in Photoshop. To what effect?

The tool I used the most when creating my music festival poster was the magic wand tool, which as I previously mentioned, was extremely effective in allowing me to remove excess/unwanted bits of the images that I imported.
I also used the lasso tool on a number of occasions when creating my music festival poster, which was useful for me to manually select bits of images or text that I did not want, when the magic wand tool would fail (by also selecting pieces of the image that I did want, as well as the bits that I did not).
The use of a text feature within the software was extremely useful, as it meant that I did not have to create the text using another piece of software, this is useful as it saves time as I did not have to spend time trying to find the correct formats to put the text into before importing into Photoshop.
The use the colour picker (and the pencil and brush) was very efficacious  in allow me to select colours from certain parts of my poster, then use that colour in other tools like the brush and pencil, which were also effective for making simple modifications to the poster.
The zoom was useful in allowing me to see selected parts of the poster on a large scale, which allowed my use of the other tools, must more specific and particular.
Finally, the move and crop tools were useful for cropping, rotating and moving images and pieces of text.
The hand tool was good for simply navigating around the poster, this was useful when wanting to look at more specific physical areas of the poster.

4. Evaluate your finished product in terms of the brief. How successful were you?

The finished product of my music festival poster is very successful in some aspects, but lacking in others. Firstly, my music festival poster does meet some of the basic criteria such as being recognised as a festival poster, as it uses conventional features of such posters, but does not plagiarise from other music festival posters. In the aspect of providing information, I believe that my poster is very successful, as it provides the typical information that other posters would provide, plus more such as the price and providers of the tickets. I believe that the fonts I used and the way in which I used different fonts for each artist’s name looked extremely professional, apart from a few fonts which looked very basic and do stand out from the rest, in a negative way, as they looked more amateur than the others. I believe that I have been successful in creating a look and theme for the poster, which relates to the genre of the music of the artists that are listed on the poster. The clear contrast between the dark and the source of light on the poster, may remind many consumers of the nightclub scene, which is clearly related to electronic and house music, and it is such themes of music that the artists listed are iconic for. I believe that the poster also successfully and effectively used conventions such as the incorporation of sponsors into the poster, which made it look more professional and official.

5. Moving on to print production for the digital and advert. What advice would you give yourself?

I think that the best thing to remember from this task is that you shouldn’t try to utilise every single tool and feature of Photoshop and try to cram what you create from these tools into your media product, you should remember the effectiveness of simplicity, but to ensure that you do include enough into your media text. I would also tell my self to remember the full potential of Photoshop and how creative it allows me and other users to be.