Creating My Front Cover

Original Image:                             Photoshop Image:

 

The steps that I took using Photoshop to create my front cover:

Before, I could start to create my front cover; I had to create a plain Photoshop A4 Page. To create this, I had to open Photoshop and go to file 'new' and then click international paper and then click A4. The size that I wanted to make my was front cover A4, to conform the codes and conventions of a magazine. Once I had opened the plain document, I had to open the image that I wanted to use as the cover of my magazine. To insert the image, I had to go to file>Open and then locate to the image that i wanted to use.

Now that I had opened the image, I could start to create my front cover. This first thing I noticed when I opened my image was that the colour of the lighting on the image doesn't look very effective, so I decided to add a colour overlay to my image. To add this I inserted a shape and drew it over the whole image and chose the colour that I wanted. As I didn't just want a block colour as my main image, I needed to lower the opacity of this shape/colour so that you could see the actual image. This is what the image looked like after I done this: 

I then wanted to change the lighting of the background, as I didn't like the background and the lighting of the image being the same. In order to change the colour of the background, I first had to change the colour of the whole image. I decided to make the whole image black and white. To make the image black and white I went to the toolbar below the layers on Photoshop and clicked on the circle symbol and clicked black and white and this made the whole image black and white.

Due to the fact I only wanted to change the lighting of the background and not the actual main image of my magazine, on the black and white layer, I went to the erase tool on the toolbar on the side of the screen and rubbed out the black and white layer of the model making sure that I kept the background black and white. This ensured that the image stood out against the background of the image as in the original image the lighting where the image was taken did not make the model stand out against the background.

The next thing that I done was changing the brightness and contrast of the image, this was again, just to make sure the model stands out and catches the readers eye. 

As seen in the image above, I changed some of the colours that are part of this image. I added a new layer and then went to>colour gradient, this allowed me to add 3 colours into my image (red,blue and green) which added an effect to the image. I added mostly blue and red to my image and a little bit of green to ensure the image wasn't too bright. To do this I chose the colour>Channel>Red>Input (Made it bigger)>Output (Made it smaller). I had to do this for all three colours. 

The effect that I added to the image took away the brightness that was on the models face; therefore, I had to add another brightness and contrast image over this effect to make the model stand out again.

Now that I have added all of the effects to the image and I have made the model stand out against the background, I could add the rest of the conventions to the magazine. The first thing that I added was the masthead (title of the magazine). I did this by adding a text layer by clicking on the 'T' in the toolbar. I needed to make this stand out just as much as the main image as this is how most readers recognise a magazine. After I had added the title of the magazine, I was able to add the rest of the conventions to my magazine, this enabled me to complete my magazine, which can be found under the title (Final Front Cover- on my blog).