Step by step Front Cover

For the font cover I decided to use this image, this is because it gives off the impression that they are great friends and the back to back pose shows that they are equal of each other, and that they are close. I really like the lighting in this image because it is not too bright and not dark like some of he other images, i think the brick wall behind them is a great look, and the colours in the bricks really stand out. By having them in front of a brick wall, i think it makes the image of an indie rock magazine even more noticeable because i it was in front of a plain or coloured background it would not look as 'rock'.

I decided that I would edit the image in Photoshop because  it would have the best effects

I adjusted the curves on the image, but I do not like the effect it had because it looks too bright

When I increased the brightness and contrast a little bit I was happy with the image, so I saved it and pasted it into InDesign.
The picture was too wide to I had to crop it to fill the size of the A4

After further editing the masthead, I was happy with the way the front cover looks. The next step is to create more text for the front cover, using the 3 different cover styles.

This is the first of the 3 front cover styles:

This is just a draft of the cover layout to see where the text would go and how it would look, I did the same for the other two layouts.

I decided to use the first cover layout, I chose this one because I think it looks more interesting than the rest.

I firstly tried out having boxes around the text, otherwise it would be hard to see the actual text. I tried to see what it looked like when I coloured the text in but I thought it looked a bit tacky, so I left the boxes white. 

To make it look better I thought that putting a shadow underneath the boxes and my masthead would look good.

Next step is to have the flash words, 'PLUS!' and NEW!' in colour, I did this by simply creating a text box.

Since I am having the main text in red writing I wanted the flash words to be in purple, however just to see what it looked like i created the cover title in paint and coloured it in purple and saved it as an image to see what it would look like.

I prefer the writing when it is red, because it does not blend in as well and stands out more.

Looking at the front cover as a whole I do not think it really works with the boxes so I decided to take them out and change the text colour to white so it would stand out against the brick background.

When looking at the image I found that it was too pixelated so I copied it into photoshop and made the following changes; I modified the colour balance and the curves layer so that the colour was brighter and so that the sharpness of the picture was increased. I changed the hue/saturation of the image making it less pink. To make the bricks become straight I had to make two different layers and turn the image and crop out the bits that were white. These little modifications have made the image change dramatically, so that it looks more sharp when looking at the front cover as a whole.

I then saved this image as a JPEG and placed in InDesign.
This is what my final front cover looks like: