Album Cover and Back Process

Front Cover

The first thing I did for my front cover was choose which image I was going to use as a focal image. I did this by narrowing down the best shots, which can be seen in a Cincopa embedded on my blog in a previous post.

This is the image that I chose for my front cover as I feel it has the 'star quality' that is required for an album cover.

I placed this image on to my album template on Photoshop and used the magic wand to remove the background. I then used the background eraser tool to go around my actor's hair, followed by the burn tool to darken and blend the edges as much as possible.

Next, I took a screenshot from my music video where my actors were just about out of the spotlight, so that I could take the piano and set from the stage. I placed this behind my focal image, however this didn't fill all the space in the frame, so I duplicated the image of the piano and vertically flipped it, placing it directly below the original image - this worked perfectly to fill the space in the bottom of the page.

The next thing I did was get a very small eraser and changed the opacity and hardness to be very light. I used this to blend the edges of my focal image even further.

I then used the rectangle tool to create a shape around my actress' arm, made a new layer via copy, put it over her original arm and skewed and duplicated it to look natural. The reason behind this was because somewhere during the editing process, I accidentally ruined her arm without realising.





The eyedropper tool was very useful alongside the brush on a light opacity to remove spots/blemishes, tidy up eyebrows, smooth over the skin complexions and brighten up eyes.

I then wrote the artist's name using the font Bernard MT Condensed with added bevel, emboss and stroke, switching it to white as this is what was conventional of other jazz albums that I had looked at. As well as this, I wrote out the song title using the font Title Rage Italic with a double drop shadow, using the eyedropper tool on my actress' lipstick in order to match up the red perfectly. The added textures were crucial in making my album look more professional, and not like I just placed any font there carelessly.

Back cover

I began my back cover the same way I began my front cover - I chose an image, and then used the magic wand, background eraser and burn tool to blend the image into the background. I chose to stick with a plain black background as this is conventional of the genre.

I then dragged over the title and artist's names over from my front cover, to ensure that they matched perfectly.

Finally, I added in the conventional features of an album back, such as a barcode, record company logo, credits and copyright info.

Spine

I decided to keep my spine plain and simple, as this is typical of any CD package. I chose to only integrate the song title and record company logo to again, follow conventions of any CD package.