Starting To Design The Front Cover

Using The Photo To Begin To Design Front Cover

The photo I have chosen to be the cover photo is this one:

I have chosen this photo because it has an eerie quality to it, like the photo of the Arctic Monkeys on the NME cover, and she will have eye contact with whoever is looking at the photo making people be drawn into reading the rest of the magazine. From my research I saw that most of the female poses I looked at used their hands in the photo in some way, an idea which I incorporated into my photo shoot. The way that Charlotte is clutching at her hair also goes with the name of the magazine, Frett, because she looks slightly confused like she is 'fretting' about something.

Editing The Photo

I am going to be using Adobe Photoshop CS4 to design the front cover of my magazine. After I had imported the image into Photoshop, it was obvious that the photo needed to lose or change the colour of the background as it was a very dull greyish/white. I decided to edit out the shadowing around Charlotte and then just have a bright plain white background around her, so it will be much easier for me to add cover lines and for the cover lines to be easily read.

I also wanted to brighten up the photo as it is quite dark so I adjusted the brightness settings to create a very modern looking, almost cartoon-like photo.