Preliminary evaluation

For my preliminary work, it was a student based magazine, using images of students from out school, and all the headlines and stories where about our school.
I looked at a variety of magazines to inspire to get a basic guide on how I wanted my magazine to look. I firstly looked at my favourite magazines, such as NME, Kerrang and Q to look at how the magazine had set out (where the picture/text was etc). I also used these to look at different mastheads, to see whereabouts the different magazine had place them on the front cover, and came to the conclusion that nearly all music magazine have the masthead directly across the top of the page. Fonts and different colours where also something I tried to take into consideration, but due to the different type of Photoshop I had to use, adding new fonts and colour where very limited, and I had very little time to be able to put great detail into my work.
Being as I didn't even know how Photoshop worked before this task, I feel I have learnt a significant amount about it and about what different effects the program can do. I learnt how to neatly cut away a picture from its background, and how to blur or sharpen parts of the pictures which I used. I also learnt how to effectively use the hue, saturation and contrast tools to edit my photo to how I wanted it to be, in order to attract the viewers attention. I think my preliminary work could of been improved a lot if I had more time and more tools to use. However I feel that the white, black and blue colour scheme worked very well together, and allowed the masthead to stand out. I also think the pictures were cut out very effectively, and I used the blur and sharpen tool to make the pictures stand out how I wanted them to. Time was unfortunately the main concern as to why  my work wasn't as good as I wanted it to be, but I look forward to using Photoshop again when I do have more time to do the work. Finally, the thing I would most like to improve is the place of the picture, and to neaten the work up a bit. I would also like to add a background to the magazine cover, or shadow the picture.