Starting to Design

With the selection process complete, I decided to move ahead with starting to design my cover on Photoshop, since I knew that I would need to take some time experimenting with the variety of tools. Airbrushing and photographic manipulation are not my forte and so I thought it'd be most productive to spend my time carefully going through the production process. Before reading further, it should be noted that a lot of the skills I used on Photoshop were self taught and had been observed from tutorials online.

As shown above, I selected the photo with the most natural approach and symbolism from my second batch of images. 

The first step was to open the photo up in the programme. The print screen below depicts this stage. 

I realised that the first problem I faced was the framing of the photograph. Although it portrays a mid shot there is a significant landscape frame to the image whereas magazines use portrait. My first reaction was to change the width of the image, but then I noticed that it would end up compressing the photo and distorting the person. 

The second, more appropriate way to counter this problem was to crop the image before changing it's size, so that the compressing effect will not be as noticeable. As we can see, I have cropped a large amount of the frame to the left as well as the tree trunk to the right, which draws in focus on the character now that the unnecessary space has been cut. 

Despite its visual similarities to the size of an actual magazine cover, the frame appears too square. With the correct width and height measurements, I was able to adapt the image to give it a more rectangular presentation. This was not instant, it took some time figuring out which measurements provided the wanted look. 

Afterwards I thought that the next logical step was to add a border onto my cover. You do this by altering the radius in 'canvas size' to determine how thick you want the border to be. I believe that a border which is too thick can make a magazine look more like a framed photo and so it needed to be a discreet but sharp edge. 

The tricky decision was the colour. At first I played around the idea of a bright/light green to compliment the emerald shade of the leaves, but then decided that it would give the overall cover too much of a natural theme. I envisioned having a balance of colours, not too many but not too few. I decided that the colour working best with dark green was aqua blue, and decided to settle with this for my border.