Promotional Package set #1 - CD Cover and Inserts Idea 1

The Front Cover Process

We did a photo shoot trying to portray a sort of  style Adele has, Melissa did the makeup and hair styling and I picked out something simple yet effective. So we decided on a front cover picture and began to experiment with ideas and see what we can do. We knew we wanted it in black and white, later we went with a sepia look.

So through the programme Adobe Photoshop CS4 we start to edit the picture. Select the picture, double click and make it a layer, so it isn't a background as we can't edit backgrounds, and as a layer we can edit this as it's a free moving image. We place the black and white effect on, and as you can see down in the right bottom corner, the panel is indicated Layers and Paths, this allows us to use the layers to edit which layer comes first and which effect is on which image. We had a bit of experimenting with the effects we could use and found Neon Glow was very effective as a front cover feature for the design.

 To apply the neon glow you go to Filter/Artistic/Neon Glow which will take you to a separate window in which you can go on to adjust the settings of the Neon Glow

Through this we can control the how big the glow is, its brightness and its colour, but as we are applying this to a black and white image we just set it to white as no colour will appear through the black and white effect.

 And here we have the result from the Neon Glow. For the front CD Cover we have to make this picture fit the size requirements for the CD Cover/Inserts, so we have to move this to a blank CD Cover sized canvas/picture document and continue editing from there.

 This is what the picture looked like after applying the Neon Glow

 And this is what we did editing it within the CD Cover size canvas. We used a cloning tool, to make sure the background from the original picture is covering the rest of the CD Cover, by doing this we select the area we want to copy, and then as a brush we click and move the mouse over the area we want to fill in. This makes it look like the background is consistent through out the picture.

 Here was the first idea for the CD Cover. "Treasure" was just an idea for the CD and this would be changed and another font will be used. We also added the information that the Cover of the song we have done is mentioned on the CD. My name is used, as a signature for my Album in a fancy/curly font. We are using the colour red as a symbol of the poppies in the video; we are keeping this as a constant theme. We used a sepia effect on the CD to give it some more colour.

 Here is the final product, for the CD Cover. A change in font makes it less boring but not to out stage the rest of the product.

Feedback

We got feedback on the first idea for the front cover. The picture blends in with the background and the writing at the top wouldn't be on the front cover of a CD. So we will be going back to our photo shooting pictures to see what we can use to make it look better. Looking back at Adelel's work, her black and white images consist of a black background and she is in black and white but through Photoshop she stands out and looks brighter to catch the audience's attention. Through this feedback we can improve and know what appeals more to an audience and make it look more professional.