Digipak Phase 3: Front Cover

 On today's episode of "team flaming hot cheetos is cursed", Khadijah our model backed out from the digipak photoshoot. But since we're used to things like this by now, Hira and I had already come up with a back up option. We used one of the shots from the music video that we both found to be really nice generally and also suitable for our cover.

the screen capture in question

I first opened the image and used the spot healing tool to fix some of the blemishes on the artist's face.

Opening a new file, I set the dimensions to the standard digipak size (5.45" x 4.95"). Next, I dragged and dropped the selected image onto this file. Hira and I were conflicted between using the full face of the artist or an extreme close up on her mouth and the flower. So I made duplicate layers of the image, which I edited simultaneously so that we we would have two options to choose from at the end. I colourised the image and adjusted the hue and saturation to give us the desired pink and black contrast.

After playing around with the brightness and contrast as well, I ended up with something I was satisfied with, and proceeded to add some effects that we had planned. I began with adding a very slight gaussian blur to the image.

In order to create a slight multi-exposure/motion blur effect I duplicated the image layer and selected and masked the artist. I then lowered the opacity of those duplicated layers and moved them slightly  away from the centre. Why not just add the motion blur effect, you ask? I did, in another layer (a lot of CTRL+J, I know) and lowered the opacity of that layer because in my opinion the motion blur blurred it a bit too much and didn't give us enough of the multi-exposure.

selecting and masking in process 4 evidence

This is where I added the motion blur as well as some noise to the image. I erased a couple of points on the masked image layers in order to remove the effect from some points. I also added a black layer with lowered opacity over all these to make it duller.

Now for the text. Our artist's name is "Hala says" (and I just realised this is the first time we mentioned that). The name was neither too desi nor too westernised, because "Hala", a local name along with the "says" neutralises it. Also, Hala is not a common name, yet is nothing that looks like it required much thinking to come up with hence looks very natural and real, which is common for indie artists. It was Hira's idea to go with a short phrase because it is increasingly becoming a cool convention among indie artists (girl in red, Soccer Mommy, The Japanese House, Men I Trust, renforshort etc.)

I used the Champagne and Limousines font for the name almost instinctively because (a) i love that font and (b) it suited the cover quite well because of its simplicity.

The album name required a bit more effort. We chose "Metamorphosis", which was suggested by Hira, as the album name because it captured the essence and theme of the album quite well, as also demonstrated in the song, where the character/artist goes through various phases after a break up and shows her growth by the end as she learns to accept it and move on.

Once we had the album name down we tried to find a font that would look nice on the cover. We first tried the "revival" font that Selena Gomez had used on her Revival album, the Grammy font, Futuris, Champaign and Limousines, and finally decided on Libby - a very minimalistic and simple yet elegant font. After adjusting the size and spacing of the title, I converted it into a smart object and applied a slight motion blur effect, in order for the title to match the cover's theme. 

For the full face image, I added a black strip over the artist's eyes because Hira pointed it out as a convention in several album covers.

This is what the final digipak cover look like: