Front Cover Production Log

By Tesfah Watkins-Scott

Crowd Effect

• The print screen above is of the beginning process of creating my reggae magazine front cover. As you can see the image shows some sort of crowd image placed on the bottom half of the Photoshop screen. To get the image and also the affect that has been used, I saved a dark black image of a crowd cheering. I then opened this image in Photoshop and then dragged the image to my music magazine front cover. However, when I dragged this image I thought to myself that the image would be to dark to be on the bottom half of my magazine which would prevent me from showing the rest of the background which I would place behind this layer. Therefore I played around with the different tools on Photoshop to try and make this crowd image lighter or faded. I then found a tool called opacity which allowed me to make the layer become less dark and more see through when I made the percentage of the opacity smaller. I made the opacity 87% which I think would work quite well when my reggae front cover is finally created.

Background ImageNow the print screen above is of when i finally found my background for my magazine after a lot of playing around with different backgrounds and also advice from teachers and family members. I decided to use this particular background because, it uses all the 3 colours red, gold (yellow) and green which are the main colours used in the reggae and Caribbean culture as I have stated before which will be very effective to my target audience. Furthermore the patterns that are used on the background like the different circular shapes I feel add a great amount of affect to the audience because to me it feels like the patterns could be associated with the musical instruments used for this particular genre such as guitars and trumpets due to the smooth effect. When I first dragged this background image across to my music magazine I used the blur tool to smooth down the sharp sections of the background which would allow the background of my music magazine to look more calm and peaceful to the audience which also links in with the soothing genre of music. When this process was completed I then dragged the background layer underneath the crowd layer so that the crowd would then be visible whilst the background of the magazine can still be seen.

Main Image • Moreover, the screen print shown presents the main image I am going to

use for my reggae music magazine front cover. The main image used I took with a digital camera in my house and used my dad to be part of the main image as he was actually born in Jamaica and grew up listening to reggae music so i thought he would suit my magazine very well. I then thought to myself, what props would suit my main image model so that it expresses the actual genre of music. I then noticed I had a guitar in my house so I made my model hold the guitar and took a couple pictures to see how it turned out. The first few times my model didn't really look like a reggae artist so I told him to act like your actually playing me something with feeling. That's when I took the final picture and then I uploaded the image to Photoshop. Once uploaded I had to remove the background of the image so that all that would be left is just the image of my model playing the guitar. So to do this I used the 'Magic Eraser Tool' and with just one click the background of the actual photo was removed and all that was left was the main image as you can see above. I then dragged the cropped image to my magazine front cover, and began to play around with the image to find a suitable place for it to look like a real magazine and be effective. I then thought that if I placed the image to the right hand side of the magazine the prop used wouldn't really be visible, so i then moved the image across to the left and found that it was a perfect fit in that particular area as shown above. The image worked very well with the crowd image shown before because, it looks as if my model is playing to the crowd and the reader which is a great affect to use to draw in the reader because it allows the magazine to involve the audience.

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