Guardians Cover

This was a book cover I designed. First thing I did was find five photos which fit my story. Four of the five originals are below.

Then I went to Photoshop to start editing the photos. First I took the picture of the sleeping girl and cut her out of the grass by using the magnetic lasso, the delete key, zoom in/out, and the eraser tool. Next I moved her to the car phot. I used the transform tool to shrink her. Then I placed her to the side. I selected her face and hand to mess with the saturation and hue like in the zombie project, but it ever worked quite right. I did undo. She looked severely photoshopped and out of place, so I did an Iris blur.

After that I went to the picture with the cages nd chess pieces (I saw it as a dreamscape) and the picture with the face in the stars. I selected the star face and copied it before pasting over to the dreamscape. I pasted it three times and arranged them to line up around the photo. I then changed the opacity.

Lastly I edited the guardian angel. I used the spot healing brush on the road. I then used the Dodge tool on her dress, wings, lightning, the reflection on the sword, and the light above her head. I sued the Burn tool a little bit on the sword and the sky in the lower right corner. I slightly used the eye dropper and paintbrush tool on her hair, eyes, and sword. I selected the background and some of the angel and put a filter on it. Then I selected just the grass and made the saturation higher.

I googled the size of an average book page. Then I went to Illustrator to arrange the photos on an art board that added an inch to each dimension of a book page, as the book cover usually goes over the pages a bit. Once I had it arranged the way I wanted, I added a rectangle on the bottom. I gave it a blue gradient. Then I added text with my choice font, font color, and font size.

Going back to Photoshop, I used the smudge tool to sort of blend the photos together. Particularly the road, so it almost looks like the angel  is walking into the other photos.