Week 2 DVD Cover

For the DVD cover I have chosen to use a picture of Spanish bodybuilder Sergi Constance. Most of his pictures are from photo shoots so have inevitably been Photoshopped. I chose a picture taken from an interview, the least likely chance of him being edited already. Image taken from: https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=sergi+constance&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ei=GZ3YVKyNGe7LsASx0oHYCw&ved=0CAgQ_AUoAQ&biw=1708&bih=776&dpr=0.8#imgdii=_&imgrc=yIht69gy96OL8M%253A%3B6RJrC3NwvdtNsM%3Bhttp%253A%252F%252Fi.ytimg.com%252Fvi%252FxqMfBgPDpOg%252Fmaxresdefault.jpg%3Bhttp%253A%252F%252Fwww.youtube.com%252Fwatch%253Fv%253DxqMfBgPDpOg%3B1920%3B1080

I have chosen a bright white brick background for my front cover, a brick shows strength and resilience which is what I am trying to promote with the nutritional information I wish to get across. http://www.cgtextures.com/texview.php?id=72860&PHPSESSID=br9pb2pdrt1bgjm7hffnvi4rv4.

Week 3 DVD Cover

I have now made the dimensions for my DVD case and will be doing the front, back and spine of the DVD case all on the one Photoshop document. This is because it will be easier to ensure that the colours mix well. This will however mean a lot of layers to manage but I have decided that it's the direction I want to go in. I have laid out a 3mm bleed horizontally and vertically across my DVD case, this is because when I crop the cover down, there may be a white line or mean that I cut some of the DVD cover off, the bleed ensures that there's space for this to happen without effecting the main project.

The size of my spine is a 14mm x 190mm, this is standard size for a DVD spine and will just contain the name of my project "Live Large", therefore doesn't need to be made bigger. Each my front and back cover for the DVD case is measured out at 128.5 x 190mm. This is because I wanted to ensure that the cover would fit perfectly and wouldn't fold up in the actual case. A 1mm difference to the normal 129mm width for each the front and back.

I have started to put my brick background on to the front page. I used a high resolution image so I was easily able to re-size it using transform tools and put on a new layer named as background. I then got an image of food on a work surface which I wanted to place at the bottom of my front page [http://thefederalist.com/2014/09/05/home-cooking-and-the-lefts-resentment-of-effort/]. I cut out the chef that was in the picture originally using the polygonal lasso tool. I used this tool because I could cut him out quite accurately as he was part of the work surface that I wanted to use in my DVD cover. After cutting him out it still effected part of the image as a section was cut out which made the image look split and unrealistic, however i copied the work surface using the quick selection tool and pasted it in to a new layer. I used the quick select tool to get the majority of the image i required as quick and accurately as possible.

I noticed however, that the food surface contained no meat, meat is the fundamental in my idea to cook to gain muscle so therefore I found an image of bits of sirloin steak on a chopping board [https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=steak+chopping+board&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ei=GaTkVO3jGsfraNTAgqAO&ved=0CAkQ_AUoAg&biw=1525&bih=718&dpr=0.9#imgdii=_&imgrc=kb6SlsYe6I4suM%253A%3B83rjRa9_EiusaM%3Bhttp%253A%252F%252Fwww.visualphotos.com%252Fphoto%252F2x3686805%252Fchef_holding_sirloin_steaks_on_chopping_board_957899.jpg%3Bhttp%253A%252F%252Fwww.visualphotos.com%252Fimage%252F2x3686805%252Fchef_holding_sirloin_steaks_on_chopping_board%3B700%3B487].
I then cut this image from the chefs hand once again using the polygonal lasso tool as it was an almost square image so I cut it out perfectly on a new layer and duplicated it in to my food surface image. I put this layer above the food surface image so using transform tools I was able to drag the steaks over the poor area, it merged with the other image very well as I considered the angle the photo was taken from.

My food surface for the DVD cover draft was now complete, therefore i duplicated both steak and the food surface layer in to the DVD cover PSD. I resized the image and it didn't pixelate too much so i adjusted the length to fit horizontally across the bottom of the screen. I did notice however a few areas that looked patchy so I went over them with the spot healing brush and part of the knife set on the counter wasn't selected so it left a transparent rectangle, which looked ridiculous. I used the rectangular marquee tool to select it and filled it in with the colour of the chopping board i got through the use of the eyedropper tool. I used the "outer glow" blending tool to make the food surface stand out more.



I tried to cut out Sergi Constance from the main image using the quick selection and the magic wand tool but it was selecting too much  of the other image even after lowering the pixels and tolerance with both tools. I therefore decided to use the polygonal lasso tool to cut him out reasonably accurately, i pasted him on to a new layer and hid the original. It showed a black outline around him so I used "refine edges" and used the smart radius to eradicate the black outline by adding 3 pixels to the edge detection and increased the smoothness of the image. I didn't make any effort to Photoshop the image of the body builder to make him look bigger. Natural bodybuilding is the correct approach to healthy living, therefore I didn't want to make it look like he was using steroids or other performance enhancing drugs. However I did also use the blend tool "outer glow" to make his outline stand out more from the background.


I created a title saying Live Large in a Rosewood std font as I believe it looked best and the made the colour orange at the top centre of the front cover. I used this font for good aesthetics so it stands out. On the spine I created a white text in Rosewood std font also. I used white font because i wanted a black background on the spine and on the back cover. I have reduced the opacity of the background to 96% as I didn't want it to be completely black and opaque.