This is the image I used for the front cover the top image is the original image and the bottom image is the edited image.

Firstly I cropped the image to be place for a a4 sheet of paper as you can see the different in shape, next I added a blur to the image, the blur I used was Gaussian Blur, you can find this on Photoshop by Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur.

Next I got the original image and made another layer so I could take the blur of the character, I did this by using the erase tool and erasing the background and it looked like this.

I also added contrast, saturation, brightness. Underneath are the changes made.