Front Cover

I have finally decided upon which photo i am going to use for my front cover. It was a toss up between two different photos. The first one (pictured below) seemed a good picture to use. I thought it looked fun. However i didn't like the background. Behind my models right shoulder you can see a group of people who was walking towards us and the window fronts and advertisements that are typical of a Town centre. I dint like this, and i so i attempted to cut out the model and the car and use it against a coloured or patterned background. This proved more difficult than i thought it would of been. The cutting out was easy however as there are leads from the machine and the bottom corner is cut off it didn't look right once cut out. Also once against a plain background it looked very obviously cut and pasted. This made the front cover look unprofessional and too simple and boring for my liking. My whole vision for my front cover was the image to be bold and eye catching and i didn't feel this picture gave me that.

(click to enlarge image)

I felt out of all my images this was really the perfect one for my front cover. The other picture had a warmer feel to it but i realised that to make it bold and stand out a warm look wouldn't work. The happy look didn't work. It needed to look cold as this would give me more room to play with text and colours. I had already played around with this image before, using it to stick to my original idea for my layout. It was because i was trying to stick to this layout that at first this image didn't work. But i realised that my layout plan wasn't right and wouldn't give the effect i was looking for. Once id got rid of that layout plan out of my head i felt more creative and felt i could and have made a better front cover than originally planned. There are some faults with the image, such as in the right hand corner next to the steps you can see what i imagine is a plastic carrier bag on the gravel. At first i tried to correct this by doing some image replacement. I did this by using the rectangular marquee tool to select the gravel above it, i then copied the selection via a new layer. This gave me a piece of gravel to place over the top of the plastic bag. This did work well and it looked like it was naturally like that. However upon thinking about the image more i felt the gravel and the wall and the lights from the parking lot beside it introduced those warm tones into the picture again and this is what i didn't want. So i scrapped the idea of correcting the fault and just cropped the image so that it only included my model and the stairs. I am now very pleased with this. The stairs are silver/grey metal and my model is wearing a black jacket with dark jeans, so it really contrasted against the stairs and made him stand out more. This was the look i was going for. At first i wasn't sure as it was a cold evening he had to wear a jacket and i at first felt it didn't work very well. However upon thinking about it more i prefer it this way. You can see his neon green t-shirt poking through and i feel it gives the look that this bold and contrasting and cold looking but i feel the poking through of the green is still bringing that fun, dance element through. I also had to do some red eye correction on the model, but i shall go through this in more detail on my next post.

(click to enlarge)