5) Designing the Front Cover

After selecting the images for the main characters I started to focus on the design of the DVD, I had found a city scape background I thought I could blend quite well, it was black and white theme and very sinister in appearance and went well with Scarlet Johansson's image in a detective style coat, gave me inspiration for the story and made me think about the blurb that needs writing on the back.

However the image wasn't large enough and the skyline had dark clouds that ideally needed extending I could have scaled the image but would loose too much of the picture and the detail so decided as the top of the picture had dark stormy clouds I could add and blend to these, giving me the extension I needed.

I liked the following picture;

However it was too blue to blend with the city scape background so I changed the camera raw filters to make it blacker by changing the saturation, blacks, whites and shadows of the basic settings to achieve a darker look and also adding a vignette to the corners. The cloud in the middle looked a little dark and stood out too much, being in the middle, so I tried to lighten it using the dodge tool and after playing with it for 2 hours dropped it onto the city scape - it looked awful. So I went in search of ideas on-line. 

Using the weblinks on the VLE I found a tutorial that I thought looked really interesting, creating a text poster, check out the link.

I thought this was visual powerful and used basic skills, which is the level I am at so wanted to try it. I scrapped the city scape, the clouds and even the picture of Scarlett Johansson. 

I started looking for portrait's of her looking head on, and found this;

I cut the selection using colour range after watching a tutorial on better selections, this allowed me to extract Scarlett more easily as the picture was on a plain background, I inverted the selection then went onto use refine edge options. I increased the smooth, feather and contrast options to make the selection better and decreased the edge option,  I made sure decontaminate colours was checked which gave me a pretty good selection then output this to a layer mask which I named "FOP Scarlett Johansson"


I changed the image to black and white by pressing "CTRL+U" (which is a short cut to "Image>Adjustments>Hue/Saturation") and decreased the saturation, I then changed the levels by pressing "CTRL+L" and moved the darks, lights and midtones until I was happy with the image. I used the burn tool specifically to make the right side of her face even darker than the left.

The result;

I used a rectangle marquee tool to create a rectangle selection that covered half SJ's face and snapped to the middle of the front cover using a guide. I then pressed "CTRL+SHIFT+N" to create a new layer from this selection, which I named "FOP Title Text". I used horizontal type tool too create the title, I chose a bold text and adjusted the leading to keep things tight to maximise the view of the face. I adjusted the title and resized until it filled the space required. I then made a selection of the text, as the tutorial advised, by holding "CTRL" and selecting the T from the layers window, which I thought that was pretty clever. I then deleted this from the "FOP Title Text" layer. ultimately allowing you to see the portrait through the text after the actual text layer is made invisible. I could delete this layer but after wanting to make adjustments to the leading/size of the title text realised its a quicker process to go back through the history and adjust the wording rather and re-delete the "FOP title layer" than start again each time. Think I will leave this layer in the final product for that reason but just invisible.

I then used the brush tool and selected white colour to go behind the letters that were hard to read and making sure the "FOP title layer" was active - having done this to SJs face once or twice in error, and brushed where the letters were hardest to make out;

Overall I was pretty happy with the front, however this only covered half the DVD and left a severe edge at the top and bottom of the front cover. I looked at black and white grunge background textures on-line to try to find one that I could maybe gradient out at the top and bottom. I also looked at other DVD covers on-line to try and find inspiration and to see if there were any trends and even tutorials on how to fade out images but this wouldn't work as I needed the hard edge to make the letters legible, if I faded out behind the text the letters it may not be.

Having looked at DVD covers on-line for inspiration it also started to make me focus my attention on the back cover and spine and the elements that were required for these.