For my final music magazine front cover I had taken a number of photographs of people who are the artists/bands who will be the main image for the front cover, the photos include different poses, camera angles, people and backgrounds.
These are the original and prior edited photographs I took:
I had difficulty choosing which photo to use for my front cover, each one having pros and cons. The main con with a couple of the photos is that they're blurry making it difficult to edit as well as looking unprofessional. A problem with the bottom left photograph is that it has captured too much light making the peoples' skin in the photograph white. On the other hand I am satisfied with the majority of the photographs; the positioning of people, the expressions being given, the lighting and contrast of colours with each photo makes most of them eligible as my front cover image.
Since I had a hard time choosing which photo to use I decided to edit them all by initially cropping out the background and edit them afterwards. Doing this would allow me to see which photo would look best when applied to the magazine cover along with the magazine conventions (to do this I save each one as a Photoshop file and as a separate layer).
I did this by using the Magnetic Lasso tool along the edges of the people in the photograph, then afterwards I used the Selection Tool for the smaller details I had missed to avoid partial sections of the background ending up on the final image. After that I edited the colours, I used the Sponge tool and chose the Saturate option to enable me to brighten and exaggerate the colours I want in the photograph (mainly the clothing, hair, eyes and lips). I had noticed that the black leather jackets the 2 people on the left/middle are wearing have been affected by the natural lighting giving it a slight blue tint, to show readers that the jackets are actually black I used the Desaturate setting on the Sponge tool to increase the grey scale of the jackets.
