Describe how your developing understanding of digital technology impacted on your creativity.

A key piece of software I was required to use throughout my media course was Photoshop. Within my first year I was required to make an authentic music magazine using Photoshop, I had very little knowledge of how to use this software at the beginning of the year and began my production using the shape and text tool to create a basic template for my magazine as these were the only tools I understood how to use, this limited my creativity greatly as it made for a very uninteresting magazine to look at. I decided to use YouTube to watch tutorials to gain a greater understanding of how to use Photoshop and this then had a huge impact upon my creativity within making my product as I was able to add drop shadows to shapes to generate a 3D effect within my work, I also learnt how to adjust brightness/contrast, and alter colours and apply filters to imagery, this was particularly noticeable on the primary image for my contents page where I adjusted the contrast to create intense white patches across the image and then applied a light brown filter. Another key feature of Photoshop I found useful was the clone stamp tool, this enabled me to airbrush and adjust images to make them cleaner, this can be seen within the image used on the front cover where I needed to remove a display board from the wall behind the band that I had photographed, using the clone stamp tool enabled me to copy segments of the wall to cover this up. In my second year I felt my creativity was limited within Photoshop as by this point I had a much greater understanding of theories such as Uses and Gratifications, and Reception theory, because of this I found I was trying to comply with these theories to ensure my media products generated the preferred reading I was trying to create for my audience. For example within the review page I created I followed many of the conventions I had seen within other film magazines, meaning the page I had created looked like a generic review page, this was however positive as this ensured the preferred reading was established to its audience, however this limited my creativity as I was trying to conform to these conventions.