OLANIPEKUN SUNDAY AGBOOLA
M00378320
The aim of this report is to demonstrate the work undertaken in designing a book cover using Adobe
Photoshop CS6 (Creative Suite 6). In this section there will be a description about what was done, how an arrangement was made about completing the design etc. Also, I will be discussing the elements that made up the completed book cover.
Before designing, lots of research was undertaken by learning how to use this application and its tools by going on different websites, forums and YouTube. The whole concept came from a programme called Star Trek – Deep Space Nine. The purpose of this was to create an alien image to let readers understand that the book is all about an Alien World. After all these design ideas, I decided to use myself as the main character. Therefore, I took my picture with a camera to depict on the book cover.
Pictures were taken in the street and of different objects from two different frames with a camera and put together (modified) as one background image. Although, the pictures were not sharp, they were modified to look better. I then selected only those improved images that fitted in with my design concept that I thought would blend together as a whole.
The “polygonal lasso tool” was used most frequently in order to give a better trimming quality, so that the images can look real when placed on a background. It also gave a perfect trimming of some parts of the body around my mouth, ears and eyes. A rectangular image was adjusted into a curve shape; the aim was to place this rectangular shape cracked mask on my face and body to look as if it was real. The extra bits of the mask left outside the image were erased, so that it can look more refined. At first, the “eraser tool” was not working properly because the Opacity and the flow value settings were very low and this had to be increased from 90-100% at each setting and as a result, the expected effect was attained. I decided to implant some horns on different parts of the head to fit in with the Alien theme. At this stage, it was not that complicated as it was accomplished.
The intention was to design a sunlight burst, however, creating this was a tricky aspect and the tool did not give the desired result. This was done over and over again but the effect was not good enough.
Therefore, the next approach was to use a trimmed white image by using the “move tool” to contract it to a slim size and creating four (4) different ones to produce the sun burst. The effect did not form an emitting light (glow) and needed improvement. For such an improvement and to get a better effect, adjustments should have been made to reduce the size of the sun and change other settings but it was time consuming due to the technical aspect of it.
The edges of two background images were joined and were altered to make the backgrounds look as if they were just one background. The tool used to blend the edges of the two backgrounds, gave quite an impressive effect although, it was not as expected. I thought it was perhaps the size of the brush, brush opacity, or brush flow settings that did not allow required effect to be achieved. However, the
“clone stamp” could have worked better to achieve this effect but I found it too technical to apply in a perfect way as learnt on YouTube. Creating a sunlight ray effect was very interesting in the design and the goal was to make the sunlight image to propagate light to the building (castle) in the background image. The tool coupled with the “adjustment settings” like the curves and levels settings gave a good striking reflection from the sunlight to look as if the sunlight was reflecting to the castle image in the background. I found this process easier to use in comparison to other tools.
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Using rain effect in this section was very difficult to achieve. After creating rain effect, it seems not to look like water falling in the background picture. It just looked like lines striking through from top to bottom. I erased the top, middle and bottom bits of the lines by making it looked like rain but it was not happening as needed. It could have been done better to make it look real and it took a lot of my time to learn different ways of creating rain effect, considering that it is not of high importance compared to other graphic effects that have been done.
The title of the book cover was at first used as a clipping mask, meaning by masking the text with a cracked background. The purpose of doing this is to make the readers understand what the book is all about as the image on the book cover has a cracked face and body as also reflected in the cracked text title. The whole idea was not successful as the text effect was not really more pronounced because of the background colour. I decided to do something different by making the text more conspicuous to achieve a better result. The text blending options was used to give a nicer font style to the text to match the images and the whole background so it can give that high quality striking effect. Then sparkle lights were placed on the text to make the text more obvious.
Conclusion
When I was given this assignment, I had no idea what to do or how to begin, let alone on how to use the Adobe Photoshop CS6 application. With a lot of researching to do, I thought it was going to take up a lot of time, then realised I was being apprehensive for no reason. The whole design concept has made me learn about this application and how to use it. Some tools that were not used in the whole design idea were learnt when research was undertaken and the whole experience was challenging. I discovered that everything that was learnt during the research came easily in some aspects. However, there were some areas that were so technical they needed more time and resources to learn. It would have been better if the “Clone stamp tool” was learnt properly using websites, so it could help to do the areas that were not done properly. The creation of sunburst would have been better to learn in a professional way as the one being done was fairly satisfactory. Learning to get a better effect requires time. However, my priority was to concentrate on the main image to get the end result.
The rest of the tools that were not used in this work require further learning which would have helped to make the whole design idea better. The “Blending option dialog box” that was used to modify texts and other objects has high technical bits that require lots of time to learn. If I had better knowledge of this tool box, my overall design work would have been more satisfactory and I could have enhanced the image and the text. The font effects were the easiest design in the whole book cover design that has been done so far and all of these design concepts have been a great experience.
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