CD SLE

EVE

THE BEGINNING!

After planning my CD sleeve I decided to use photoshop to create it.

I also decided that I would need a starting point for the shape of the CD sleeve, so I searched on the internet and found a template that was the shape and design that I wanted to use. (shown below)

I opened this in photoshop and began from there.

EDITING PHOTOS

I had previously taken a lot of photos that I knew we could use for the CD sleeve. I then just needed to edit them as they looked slightly bland.

To do this I basically made them brighter and then put the contrast up.

Then using colour manipulation in photoshop I heightened the yellows and reds and added a tinge of purple into the photos, this really made the leaves and trees look bright and colourful.

With the close ups I decided to edit any blemishes from the skin as in the professional industry when making a CD cover or when editing a photo the skin would also be edited. I brightened any noticeable shadows on the skin then used cloning to get rid of noticeable spots.

On the next few slides I will show the raw images along with the final images after editing.

ADDING IN THE PHOTOS

Ruby and I then had to decide which photos we wanted on which pages of the CD sleeve.

After we decided I needed to place them onto the template in photoshop and then resize them so that they fit.

We wanted each set of photos to go on opposite sides of the CD sleeve;

I also added in a green base for the back and front covers of the CD as we’ve yet to confirm what we want to put on these.

CREATING THE FRONT COVERSo for the front cover we wanted a photo that fit in well with the rest of

our cd sleeve and also that linked with the video well.

We also thought it would be nice to have both characters together in the photo, so keeping with the theme of nature and trees we had them stand either side of a tree.

Also the front cover needed a space on it somewhere to put the artist’s name and the song title, so we kept this in mind when shooting the photos for the cover.

Here’s the photo we decided to use in the end;

FRONT COVER CONT

Obviously Max’s leg cast is extremely noticeable so the first thing I decided to work on was getting rid of that. I did this by using both the clone and healing brush to use parts of his jeans to cover the black cast, and then using the healing brush I tried to create a smooth, realistic looking jean effect.

FRONT COVER CONTTo create an effect that I felt fits with the rest of the CD sleeve I used the colours, brightness and contrast to create a green hue over the entire photo, and I also wanted both the tree and the characters to look quite dark – I had to use the selection tool to slowly pick out the entire tree to change the colours and brightness.

When researching CD sleeves I noted that around a lot of front covers had ‘frames’ around them, and this had a really nice effect so I thought I would use this idea. I thought the most appropriate frame would be vines and leaves, so I simply got some images of ‘vine frames’. This is the path I took to create the frame of vines;

• ‘place’ vine frame on top of existing layers in photoshop

• Change colours so they had a red hue over them

• Used magic eraser to delete entire white background of placed image

• Did this over and over again to create a really nice layered effect with the frame.

FRONT COVER CONT

This is the outcome of the vine frame;

FRONT COVER TEXTAdding text onto the front cover was the most difficult part for me, as on the school computers we are unable to download brushes or text for photoshop, and usually this is how I would go about adding text onto photos. After searching through the photoshop fonts there were really none that would have fit with our CD cover, so I decided to go onto google and search on font sites – once I found one that would look suitable I added it as an image onto the CD cover. I had to play around with this for some time as I had difficulty with the text being difficult to read over the dark and white background so in the end I used an existing photoshop brush and created a little layer of leaves for the text to go over.

I’m not completely happy with the text and if I were to redo it I would want to download photoshop texts or brushes to create it with.

ADDING INFORMATION

From my research I found that CD sleeves stereotypically have things like; thankyou’s, barcodes, song listings, and links to websites for the band. My last job was to add these types of things onto our CD sleeve to make it seem more realistic;

I added a barcode and a ‘universal records’ logo on it, then a paragraph of thankyou’s, and also links to different websites!

THE FINAL PRODUCT!

I’m extremely happy with how the CD cover has come out, I feel it portrays everything we wanted to portray about the band and genre and also has a professional feel to it!