1. Media AS Making of the Cover

2. Photo Shoot To make the cover I had to set up a photo shoot so I could create a musical background. The shoot had to be relevant to my music genre which is rock. The first thing I had to do was to Find an environment in which I could take a photo shoot in. It had to be a place that accommodated musical instruments such as drums, guitar and piano. I did some research and found that in my college there are music practise room which are for use for music students. My next step was to contact the head of the music block and ask for permission to rent out a practise room and take photographs. I did this and permission was granted. This allowed me to have a good environment for my shoot. Then I had to find a model for my shoot. I emailed my friend Charlie and he agreed to model for me.

3. Email to Charlie (model)

4. Photo’s for Cover

5. Chosen Photo After going through each of the cover photos I took. I found this was going to be the best suited. What I really liked was the white space above the subject which would make for a perfect mast head. There is also a lot of emotion coming from my model and this makes a bigger impact as a front cover compared to the others. The colours were also more neutral, this will make it easier to edit and to layer the photo with writing. I am pleased with this photograph and feel it will work really well.

6. Cover Plan What I have done here is by hand drawn a rough plan on what I want my cover to look like. As you can see I have sketched the main photograph which will act as the subject. Through this I have been able to distinguish where the empty space lies and thus able to create text. What I haven’t shown on this plan is the colour scheme, but I want to focus it on red and have shades of different levels of white and blacks.

7. Editing the Background Before I create my magazine cover I will first have to edit my background image.

8. I changed the levels of the image manually.

9. Then I added a red background layer to make it easy to see and added a mask over my original photograph. After this was set up I then used magic wand to select background parts to delete. It was quite perfect so I had to manual add or delete parts using the rubber. The red background made this easier to achieve.

10. Here is the final image after the levels have been change and after I have taken away the background noise.

11. Creating the Cover The background base colour of my cover is a gradient between purples, blacks and greys. This fills in around my cover image.

12. After finalising what my background colour shading should be, I imported my image onto the coloured background I created. As you can see it comes through where I earlier had taken away.

13. Following the colour scheme of the cover I added text, This included the masthead and other information.

14. Final Cover This is the final cover I produced on Photoshop. In this I have included a masthead, barcode and other textual headlines. I tried to follow a strict colour scheme because I found this very important from my research. I also tried to integrate my objects and texts in line with my background image. For instance I created the square object in the white space, I feel this works really well. I also had the mast head on an angle following the lines of the background. Another technique I used was to create shadowing behind my subject, this made it stand out from the background. This makes it look more professional and gives a better feel for the over all magazine. Another final touch was I pained in some of the drum kit red, the same colour as the text. This was to add a stylish blending effect you might sometimes see on magazines.

15. Evaluation This cover took a few attempts to create, firstly because of the software I was using. The saved formats were wrong causing me to lose some of my work and concluding me to starting again. Secondly I wasn’t quite sure what feel I wanted to give off and that’s when my research came into play. I spent a lot of time looking at my selected magazines and taking and manipulating ideas from it into my own. The photo shoot went really well because I was able to get the perfect front cover photograph. I was able to do this because I had a plan before the shoot and I was able to organise it to work in my favour. Then there was the editing which was fairly enjoyable. However it took me awhile to get used to the tools and extract the information I wanted. As you can see I used a variety of Photoshop's tools to create my final cover. I really like how simple the mast head is and I think the colour scheme works really well with the whole feel of it. All together I feel this was a great success and by having the research and careful planning it really helped get me moving through the process.