Making my magazine advert

My magazine advert was created in Adobe Photoshop CS5 Extended. I had previous experience of this programme as I used it at AS level to produce my music magazine for my coursework.

 

The first step that I took after I had decided on an image to use for the advert was to copy it into Photoshop and edit the skin. There wasn't much to do but I used the spot healing tool just to get rid of a few marks that were on the skin.

 

I then selected the lips and used the colour balance tool to make his lips slightly more red. Because of the colour of the shot they didn't really stand out too much so I added the slightest bit of colour to the lips without making him look like he had lipstick on.

The next process was hard and it included adding a lot of blank layers to the document and playig around with the background of the photo. I don't have any screen shots for this part of the process because at the time of doing it I was under a lot of stress and forgot the button existed. The main things I experiemented with though were the colours in his shirt. They are very dark colours such as the red, green, brown and black. They were awkward colours to do anything with once I had cut him off the background. My original thoughts were not to use the original background because it looked very yellow and I wasn't keen on it. I spent around 2 hours creating different backrounds before I decided to use the original photo background. I decided that although I didn't like the colour of it, it still looked a lot better than a black background with green and red dots like I had tried at one point.

I then had the idea to make the image black and white. Some of the album covers I had looked as such as Trey Songz looked really good in this format.

I edited my image in the 'black and white' section of image adjustments.

In the image below you can see that it wasn't just as simple as making the image black and white, I had to edit a few colour out of the image to make it how I wanted it to look. As I have said the image was very yellow so I played around with that level. This reduced the shade of the image making it a bit lighter in certain areas but making him stand out more as he became darker.

My next job was to add text to the album cover to make it look like an album cover and so everybody knew who the artist was. I did this using the text tool. At first I created it in the top corner of the page but I decided that this didn't look right. The thickness of the text also wasn't right so I used the 'drop shadow' and 'stroke' tools to make this look bolder and stand out more on the page. I also manipulated the size of the text by using the 'Scale' tool.

The font was something that took a long time to get right. Originally I wanted the title of the album and the name to be a different font but once I had tried that out I didn't like it. I spent a lot of time playing around with the font tool before I found the right one.

Once I had moved the text around on the page again I decided the text still wasn't think enough so I managed to choose a different font that allowed me to make the text a lot bolder than it had previously been.

Once I had moved the image over to the side of the page I thought about using different layers of the image and building them up on top of each other. I began this by cropping parts if the image off that I didn't want to use as can be seen in the image below.

I duplicated the original layer so that I had an unharmed copy of the image that I liked. I also created a lot of duplicates so that I could play around with them. I decided to cut the image 6 times in the same place and put them next to each other in equal spacing so there was a lot of the face.

I then selected the 'curves' tool bar which allowed me to change the shading of the image.

I reduced the curve by 20 on each image making the one on the far right very faint.  

I really liked this approach, I thought it was cool but I then had an issue with the text on the album cover. It became very faint and even after adding a black outline to the text, it was still difficult to see. I made the decision that this wouldn't work very well.

The other things that I had to include on the advert were the record label logo, where the album would be sold and the number of stars the album had been given. I did this by saving images from the internet and uploading them into PhotoShop. I then cropped and re-sized the images to how I wanted them to be. I think the positioning of the images are good.