final cover: front and back

Right! finally getting my final front cover on here. It took about an hour's shooting time and about four to five hours of photoshop work over several days to complete, but i am happy with the result.

Front Cover:

My idea was based on the theme of internal conflict, the battles fought inside a persons mind. This is based on an earlier sketch i did and i am glad i followed it through, despite the effort. I will post the cover first then how i did it...

Here it is. It may be a little dark on macs, if so i will edit it and re-upload at a later date. It was made by doing a series of self portraits while having the camera on a tripod so the environment and camera angle and zoom was the same for every shot. The exposure also had to be the same so it was shot on manual mode. i used markers on the floor to plot out where each person would stand, mainly to compose the shot but also to allow the observing people to look as if they are watching the fight. Once i had all the photos (several public clothes changing sessions later) i brought the base photo into photoshop...

This is the base photo, the photo all the other elements will be added to. I used this as the base because it was the photo with the person standing the furthest back in the shot. All the added peices will be in front of this person.

Once all the layers where in i began merging them by using the eraser and lasso tool, along with me graphics tablet to cut around most parts of the people and delete the rest of the layer. This took A LONG time and i lost my temper on many occasions, but i got it done in the end. I could have probably used some auto selection magic wand tools but in my opinion they leave a sloppy result which always has to be tidied up anyway, might as well get it done right the first time.

Now for some blood. As in my other posts my handy collection of paint splats is used again, this time i made them a blood red colour.

I set them to 'overlay' layer mode and transformed them into position. The blood coming off the face is a little hard to see but any lighter and it looked too fake. I guess subtle is the key word here.

Now the album text! this was quick and easy, i basically rasterized some text and erased bits to make it look faded and worn.

I then flattened the final image and duplicated it. To this duplicate i added an Angled Strokes effect, reduced the opacity and tinted it blue with the hue/sat window. This gave the final cover a bit of mood and atmosphere.

Back Cover:

The back cover is very simple, I based it on my original sketch i did at the start of the assignment. I took a shot of the tarmac in the carpark and played with the contrast a bit to match it to the front cover. I added the tracklist from the real album and used the same method on the text as the front cover to make it look gritty and worn. I took the barcode from a back cover image online and pasted it in. Done!

I learnt a lot from this assignment and improved my photoshop skills considerably. I used many different layer modes and effects and tools to create the final images and i know i will find them invaluble in the future.

playing in photoshop... again

Here is a breakdown of my latest photoshop session: creating an advert from scratch.

To start with i needed a product, which would be my Skullcandy headphones. I wanted to keep it simple looking so i shot them on my desk with a lamp to one side creating interesting shadows, and the main light in the room on so they weren't too harsh.

I added a little vignetting in photoshop by cutting a circle out of a black filled square and then Gaussian blurred the rest, leaving just the soft outer edges. So far so good.

To make the headphones my own design i had to do some heavy photoshopping. I started with the colour. Rather than modify the whole lot i chose certain parts of the headphones to change colour, easing my workload. I started by using the quick select and circle select/deselect tools to perfect my selection (with the aid of my graphics tablet). I selected all the bits that i wanted to change using this method, which took about 20 minutes.

To change the colour (i wanted a nice vibrant orange) i opened the hue/sat window, set it to colourise (or colorize as the americans over at Adobe would have me spell it) and found the colour i was after. Straight away it looked pretty awesome.

Colour adjustments complete

 Next came the logo. Now i had decided to rebrand the headphones to my own fictional company 'Waveform' so the logo naturally had to be a wave. I found a similar logo through google images and just filled in the bits i did/didn't want with white/black to get my own logo the easy way.

Then it was just a matter of filling the white with orange, adding grain to match the headphone material (filters>noise>add noise) and rotating it into place. To blend it in i cut all the black out and clone stamped in the gray plastic from the headphones. Sorted.

Now my idea was to have the company customise the headphones in any colour combination desired, so a decided to theme the image that way by adding paint splats over it, as if they'd just been sprayed. I have a selection of stock images i bought a while back, which included black and white photos of paint splats and drips (pre-keyed). So it was easy to simply change the colour with hue/sat and set the layer mode to 'multiply' and presto, the paint splats look real. Some erasing was required where the layer mode looked wierd on the headphones, which ruined the effect of the paint being underneath them.

Paint splat set to 'multiply'. Finding the right layer mode was a matter of trial and error.

All the paint splats complete using the same method as before (although some required different layer modes). The final image is pretty much done now, i just wanted to add some text and a company logo to actually give it the promotional advert effect.

To save me posting another 12 or so images i am going to talk through this step in one post. Firstly the main orange splat was made using default photoshop brushes at different opacities. The text was cut out by first creating the text, rasterizing it so it could be edited and then selecting it, going to the splat later and deleting the selection from it. A simple idea but i reckon it looks pretty good. The logo i made/stole/edited for the headphones was used to cut out the shape from another splodge of paint. I finish it all off by using brush and erase tools with various brushes to add painterly details around the edges. This took forever and i hope i never have to do it again. That's it pretty much done now, but i wanted to emphasise the colour customisation options...

So by using the hue/sat tool to modify the reds in the image (once it was flattened) it was easy to get as many colours as i wanted! which is lots...

equipment list

Here's a quick list of what i took with me to do my final shoot:

Canon EOS400D
Canon 18-55mm lens
Tripod
Lens cloth

Various clothes
Guitar
50p coins (to use as markers for standing positions, photoshopped out later)

bang

cool album covers

I looked up some album covers i liked (and some of my personal faves) as research for creating my final cover. I wrote a little about each one and why i like it to try and identify what makes them appeal to me.

This is one of my favourite albums of all time, Sunshine Underground's second album, Nobody's Coming to Save You. I like the design a lot, it seems industrially themed and has an almost communist Russia propaganda feel, or maybe art deco influences. Either way i think it's a really cool design and the colour pallette works really well.

I found this on a website of greatest album covers and it really caught my eye. Such a simple shot/idea yet very iconic. And i think that's why i like it, simple yet effective. I can imagine the shoot that produced this artwork was probably wrapped up in well under an hour.

Another cover that caught my eye is Starting Line's Direction. Again a very simple idea but it works really well and is immediately recognisable. I like the way the ground frames the edge of the album and how if i look at it full screen i find i unconsciously tilt my head to the side to try and see it the right way up. The blue and yellow work really well too, this is a great cover.

Another one of my favourite albums, and my favourite album cover ever. It's very arty and meaningful, the title and haunting image work together really well. The man with the gas mask (which implies to me that the world has been the subject of some kind of devastation like nuclear war) looks up in desperation at the figures flying above. Whether they be the cause of the destruction or the saviours of mankind leaving the fallen behind i haven't decided, all i do know is it is very thought provoking.

 This had to be on my list of favourite album covers. It's a great album and such an iconic cover and yet the photo itself was taken very quickly and not even focused properly. Maybe that's why it appeals so much as it adds to the gritty, punky feel of the album.

Another one of my own albums that i pretty much bought just because it looked good. The image is made up of many photographs of the same type of object (gas storage thing) layered over one another. The effect is really cool and i am going to try it myself once i have decided what kind of structure to use. The colour scheme really finishes it off with a sickly, toxic yellow smog colour which compliments the gas storage thing.

Finally i chose the White Stripe's Elephant album cover. I love it because it's a simple studio shot but really well thought out. I am seeing a theme here with my favourite covers and that is simplicity (apart from one or two). I think it stands out mainly because of all the red but also because there's little details that keep you looking at it while you figure it out.