Process of creating the Digipak Front Cover

I wanted to add sparkle effect around the border of my album front cover to connote the magic if the  music performed by the artist. I did this by creating my own brush tool named "sparkle" by mixing three different brushes together. (The process of creating this brush tool can be seen in the post "Star effect for Digipak", where i practised the effect).

It sounds very simple, but I found it very difficult using the crop button on the default Photoshop tool bar. The size of my photographs are standard so not suitable for the digipak therefore it was necessary my images were cut or cropped.

The main title of the album cover is the artists name "Brooklyn Wood". As you can see from the print screen, this draft is fairly basic and more work needs to be put into the title to make it stand out on the page. Also I need to add the name of the album.

I have experimented increasing the saturation on my image to make the red and orange colours brighter.

  

I also experimented adapting the main title to see if I could make it more eye catching and bold. The burgundy colour does compliment the costume of the model adding a bright tone to the dark background.

Here I decided the title of the album should be appropriately named "The last song". I used a alternate font to ensure the artists name stands out the most on the page. I am still unsure about the colour to use for my title.

The main reason why my text doesn't seem to look right on the page is likely to be because of the location of the photograph- the busy background. I had to remove the model from the background so I could use the blur tool; there are two different ways of doing this. I decided to try using the eraser tool first on one layer to then use Gaussian Blur on the background image.

The print screen below shows the rubbed out image of the model.

This shows the process of using the eraser tool (with the layer eyes turned on) to make the model stand out against the blurred background.

After I had finished editing the image, I moved the text layers at the top of the right hand side column, making the text viewable. In order to compare the appearance of the different font colours I decided I should add in the sparkles to witness the effect. The glittery sparkles compliment a white title.

This is the final construction of my CD cover.