4) The Characters - choosing images

I have started drafting up the front cover and hadn't thought too much about the theme but have based the characters upon actresses I like, I searched the web for pictures that I found interesting and would work well for a front cover. My initial aim is to remove their portraits and composite them onto a dark city scape background, so I chose pictures with plain backgrounds so I could easily select the image I needed. 

The two pictures I chose to play with were of Jennifer Aniston and Scarlett Johansson, I found that they had done a similar hair product advert, therefore the lighting was similar in both pictures which may work well if both are to appear on the front cover:

I'm typically into photography and modelling and these ladies have such classic looks. The photos themselves inspired me, the one of Jennifer for her look, its difficult to pose in this position and takes a clever photographer to capture her intense expression, I thought this would be a good photo to play with because it would demonstrate good attention to detail; Her hair flicks in strands so would be interesting to see if I could make a good enough selection of her hair and make it look natural.  

The one of Scarlet again because it was on a plain background that would make it easier to select and replace,  I also liked the way they could be made to appear to be looking at each other on the front cover.

Scarlet's look makes me think of a modern day detective, would be good for the story line and Jennifer has a look that could be portrayed as cunning, therefore a twist to have her play the villian.

Heres a rough look at how the first crop and layering went; 

It's rougher than I'd liked but as a first attempt felt happy I could improve using destructive retouching to blend into the background. However the hand circled above doesn't look good at this size and looking at positioning and the scale I may have to reduce the size of both images. I think I'd like to try to remove it and use the clone stamp tool and the patch tool to reconstruct the coat or other methods should I learn them. Looking into tutorials on you tube I found the following useful;

easily remove objects   and compositing