316
1
Begin by photographing your book. Sadly, books aren’t
printed with blank covers, which would be convenient.
But there’s a simple solution: take the jacket off a hardback
book, and turn it inside out. Put it back on the book, and you
have a perfect white cover to photograph.
4
Place the new Smart Object cover above the cover we
made in step 2, and use COg LAg to turn
this into a clipping mask. Use Free Transform to distort the
new cover to fit this shape: make the cover slightly larger, so it
overlaps the photographed cover by a little way.
I
F YOU WANT YOUR BOOK COVERS TO
look old and tattered, as in the illustration
for the Independent, above, then your best bet
is to take an old paperback and photograph it.
For this image, I ripped off the cover, leaving
just the blank flyleaf: that way, I was able to
place my new cover on top while allowing the
creasing of the flyleaf to add texture to it.
Clean, pristine hardback books, on the other
hand, are hard objects to photograph. Apart
from the problem of getting the right angle, the
close trimming of the paper makes it look like
a solid block rather than individual pages: old,
slightly worn books work very much better.
Judging a book by its cover
11
Paper and fabric
SHORTCUTS
MAC WIN BOTH
317
HOT TIP
If you have
a version of
Photoshop
prior to CS4,
you’ll find that
Free Transform
won’t allow you
to distort the
Smart Object in
step 4. If you’re
working with
Photoshop prior
to version CS2,
you won’t have
Smart Objects at
all. The solution
in both cases is
to make a new
group from your
cover elements,
then duplicate
the group (so
you’ll still have
the original if you
need it), merge
the layers and
then work with the
cover as a single
flattened layer.
2
Isolate the cover from the rest of the book, and make a
new layer from it. We’ll need this to fit our drawn cover
onto later, and we’ll also need a copy of it to add some texture
to the cover.
5
Make a copy of the duplicated, photographed cover,
and place it on top. Set the mode to Hard Light, and
Desaturate using CSu LSu: use Curves to
adjust the brightness so it adds some texture to our new cover
without swamping it completely.
3
Create your cover head-on, to the right proportions.
When you’ve finished, select all the cover layers and
choose Convert to Smart Object from the pop-up menu in the
Layers panel (there’s more about Smart Objects on page 400).
Now we can work with it as if it were a single layer.
6
Select the visible portion of the jacket that fits around
the back cover of the book, and make a new layer from
it. This step’s optional, but can look impressive: copying
background elements from the drawn cover onto here makes
it look like a convincing wraparound.
How to Cheat in Photoshop CC
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