Cover - In the making...

I've been working on the cover page for the last couple of days using the Adobe Photoshop CS5 software. I've been learning loads of stuff along the way, and took on a fair bit of know-how from the similar Elements program I used to create the double page spread.

Rather than find an image that shows live band/music I've decided to go for a simple subject person on my front cover, slightly offset to the right to allow for coverline space. We did the photo-shoot for this last week with Steve (who features on the cover) stood in front of a white wall. This made the photo easier to work with later on as I could then crop Steve from the image and place a background behind him.

This was the photo I chose out of around 15 to use on my front cover...I cropped Steve using the magnetic lasso tool and afterwards the background eraser tool with a small brush. I then changed the hue, saturation and contrast of Steve to make him a look a little more radiant and more suitable for the front cover of a magazine. I created a shadow behind Steve by selecting the cropped-out Steve, feathering it by 30px, painting it black and finally altering the opacity to 70%.


This feathering effect to create a subtle shadow was also used behind the text box created for the coverlines. This helped to visually separate them from the background graphic, rather than have no visual difference between the two and just having a general conglomeration of colours which would not have been easy on the eye.

I went for a colourful, eye-catching background graphic and general colour scheme. I thought it may be a good idea to match the cover image (namely Steve's clothes) with the colour scheme, so I used a pink/green/blue scheme with some small black/white chequered areas. The background image was created using the '80's Kung Fu' photoshop brushes that I downloaded from BrushKing.

The draft of the cover I've almost finished making (with just minor additions - it's text for the coverlines, strapline,  price) is very intricately designed and has around twelve layers with each particular area of the cover on it, for example Steve + the shadow is on a completely different layer to the masthead, strapline, coverline text box and background graphic.

I think the mad colour scheme and the lighting effects I added to the masthead/title works well in keeping with the electronic music theme and the name of the magazine 'Strobe' is very fitting.

So here is what I have so far:

Just a couple of questions to ask you,

- Should I keep the same colour scheme and use it in elements of the contents page and the DPS?

- In your opinion, how could it be improved?