Here is my final book cover, I think it looks alright! The project brief stated that the images must include a person so I decided to take some portrait shots against a plain background, as this gave me loads of space to play around with text in the editing stages.
I decided to make my book cover about mental health because it is a topic that I am familiar with as I grew up with members of my own family suffering with different mental health issues.
Shooting
All of the images were taken against a white sheet using my Canon 1000D, on manual mode and set to the highest quality Jpeg file size. I also used a YN-460 external flash, which was located on top of the camera.
I shot these photos in colour as this is what I do with all of my work, I do this because it gives me more options: to keep the images in colour, convert them to black and white or convert them to black and white but preserve some colour / colours.
Editing
I used the Adobe Photoshop CS2 software to edit my images and to produce the final book cover (seen above.)
Before creating the final book cover I prepared each image individually I did this because once everything is placed onto one canvas (that’s Photoshop language for a page) it’s hard to edit an individual image properly without changing the rest of the document too, plus this way I could ensure that each image was just right by checking the histogram after applying new adjustment layers.
Front Cover Image
As you can see I have edited this image the most, one of the most noticeable edits is that I have removed his eyes, I achieved this by using the clone tool to copy skin areas of the photo over the top of his eyes, I then used the healing brush around the edges to blend the cloned areas with the original skin areas. I finished off by using the blur tool to slightly blur the whole area that I had just worked on as this gave the photo a more natural look to it.Back Cover Image
For this image I only really adjusted the curves (this tool is a more precise way of adjusting the contrast of an image) I also converted the image to black and white by using the Channel Mixer adjustment.
I knew that I would have to have consistent images for my idea so I copied the adjustments above onto the front cover image too.
Once I had saved these images I was ready to put my book cover together.
I opened a new canvas at A4 size, then placed both images onto it and positioned them.
I then had to choose which font I would use, come up with a book title and think about what I wanted to write for the blurb on the back (so all of the writing is my own too!)
I decided to use my own logo instead of a proper publishers as I wanted every part of the book to be my own and all of it was apart from the barcode.
With everything in place and all text at the right size, in an appropriate font all I had to do was save my work, I saved in both Jpeg and PSD formats, Jpeg for easy viewing on almost all computers and PSD just in case I ever wanted to go back and make further changes.
A few tips:
If you have the option to use rulers or guidelines on your editing software use them as you don’t realise how useful they are until you start!
Save regularly and make back ups to an external source (like a memory stick) as ALL computers (PC or MAC) can crash and you’ll end up having to start again.
“Attention is in the detail”
All images in this post are © Mike Addison 2011
