This is the original picture of the background of my CD cover design

To edit the picture I desaturated the picture using adjustments and desaturate

This is the result of the desaturated picture

I then used variations to make the picture have a more sepia coloured tone to it. This was so that the picture of the artist who will be wearing a pink dress will stand out more against the brown colours. I used different variations to get my desired effect.

I then copied the background and used Gaussian blur to 28 pixels to blur the photo in the background. This was to make sure that the artists’ picture did not blend in with the background but stood out. I found this was a typical convention of many other CD covers.

Finally I selected Overlay on the copy of the background to soften the blur This also gave the photo brightness. This was my final background picture

After choosing the most suitable picture I used Photoshop tools to cut out Emily. This was tricky as I had not used a green screen behind so used the tolerance levels on the magic wand to be able to cut as much away from the background as possible while still leaving the photo of Emily smooth around the edges. After cutting the image out I used the smoothing tool to smooth out the edges.

This is the final cut-out of my artist before placing the photo on the background image.

By simply copying and pasting the image of Emily into a new layer on my background image I was able to add the photo. I then used the transform and scale tools to re-size and place the image to where I waned it to be.

Photoshop has a range of brushes that can be used to create details. I created a new layer and used these brushed to create swirls and stars to give the album cover a more feminine look. I was able to re-size the brush to fit to the size of the CD cover. I used size 150px.

Using layer styles I was able to customise the font. I used a drop shadow to give the writing more depth so it stood out from the background and pink swirls and also an outer glow. I used this outer glow to separate the writing from the pink background as I found that these were clashing and it was hard to read the text.