Evaluation: What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?

In completing this project, I've had to use both photomanipulation and publishing programmes, in this case Adobe Photoshop and QuarkExpress for the front cover and contents page respectively.
I used Photoshop in creating my front cover. Using its painting and editing capabilities I was able to easily cut the model from the original background of the photo and edit it using the magic wand and paint tools, manipulate the different elements seperately using the "layers" function, create borders for my smaller images and insert shapes, before rotating them in the way I wanted. Being such a versatile programme, there was little to nothing which caused me a problem, and I was able to achieve everything I wanted to with it.
However, I found that it was very difficult to get the results I wanted on QuarkExpress. Although it offered the shapes and word processing that Photoshop did, I found it was not able to cope with detailed images and reduced their quality significantly, making both my font and pictures seem pixellated and fuzzy. As it didn't have a magic wand tool, its parallel capabilities of making areas transparent was much poorer, leaving a white outline behind which made layering the image on top of a coloured background look messy and unprofessional. Also, as it provided me with no seperate layers to work on, after a while of placing images and text in the work space I found that they were more and more difficult to select as they overlapped each other.