Technical Steps for a Book Cover

Advanced Version

In this page we'll look at creating a reasonably advanced type of book cover. Just as with the simple version, we want to start with some stock image and with a canvas size of 2813 pixels wide by 4500 pixels high.

I had a stock image of the man and woman, pointing left. I rotated it to point right because you always want the image on the cover, when possible, to draw the eye right and down. That triggers a psychological image of turning the first page.

I then had to remove the default background that came with the image. With a less expensive program you would do this by carefully erasing around the edges with an erase tool. With something like photoshop you make an adjustment layer to that image and you can carefully paint white on the adjustment layer. That way if you erase a bit too much it's quite easy to paint black to restore the image in that spot.

For the letters, I first made the letters as one normally would - with a text tool. Then I "Simplified" that layer which in essence makes it into a graphic. I then selected a section of the first letter and used select - similar to get it to select all of the areas of all of the letters. Now I could use the gradient tool to fill in those letters with a shading from yellow to orange.

I added in a medallion image, based on the very first cover I had for this book. I explain how to make that kind of a medallion in a later page.

If this is a bit complicated, you can either practice a while to get used to the technique or you can easily hire someone online to help with the task!

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