Creation of front cover

Editing our chosen image

In order to start the process of creating our album cover we decided to photoshop the image we had selected. We wanted to airbrush Millie's face in order to give the image a more professional finish that we could then work from. The steps below are the ones we followed whilst airbrushing Millie's skin...

1) Change the colour mode to CMYK, copy and paste yellow channel + invert the layer. Then, change the mode back to RGB. Change layer to soft light.

2) Copy background layer, move it to the top and then use the spot healing tool to get rid of blemishes. After that, covert all layers to smart object.

3) Copy layer and select gaussian blur - move scales until you can barely make out the skin but the eyes are still visible.

4) Copy the original layer again, select high pass and more scales so that you can make out skin details. Then, change to linear light.

5) Group all layers and insert a layer mask - use the paint brush tool to apply the airbrush.

6) Merge layers then use dodge + burn tool to contour.

After airbrushing Millie's skin we made a few final touches such as filling in her eyebrows in sparse areas, brightening her eyes using the hue and saturation tool and using the same technique to brighten her lips.

When we had nearly completed the editing our teacher noted that a piece of Millie's hair looked oddly out of place. We agreed and so used the clone tool to remove it. Lastly, we made the image black and white.

Making the cover on photoshop

In the image above I am making the selected image black and white.

In the above image we have put the image onto a grey background by duplicating the layer. In addition, we cropped the picture both to make it a CD sized image and also to get rid of any unnecessary space and put all of the focus on Nova.

Here we have added the text for the main title 'Nova' - which was spoken about in my previous blog post named 'Creating our logo'  . In addition we added the album name 'Fragments'. We used a text called 'Basic Title Font' from DA Fonts for this title. We chose this font as it is sleek yet minimalistic and doesn't take away from the main title 'Nova'.

This was the last stage of creating our front cover and most probably the most complex. We started the process by finding a basic hexagon shape on google and copy and pasting it onto the photoshop document. We then used the gradient filter to create a fade in the colour, so from yellow up to blue without any definite lines that clearly show the transition of colour.

This is our final front cover. We are extremely pleased with the final outcome and think it looks very professional. If we were to do this again we would try out a wider range of colours to use for the hexagons to see if we could create an even more vibrant front cover.