Cover It - Some Basics for Cover Design

Brush it Up

Photoshop is a versatile design tool, there is a lot you can do with it. Especially with the newer versions. There are brushes and Photoshop actions you can add to the program to make it even more versatile. They're fairly easy to install once you know how to do it. You can do a lot of things with these brushes and they make design work slightly easier.

This is only a small sample of some of the brushes that I have.

These brushes can assist in creating images that previously needed to be blended from stock images, which can often be difficult. There are several sites where you can download the brushes for free and there are others where you can purchase them. Same with the Photoshop actions. The site where I downloaded my brushes is called brusheezy.

You can create some nice effects with these brushes. All the effects in the lightning tree image were created with brushes. The lightning, the fire, the lens flare, and the darker overlay.

Brushes are another tool to assist designers in completing their work. One of the issues with doing things with images is when images are converted to CMYK for print it often creates shadows where things have been erased, it can also negate effects you've put on the layers.

You can see the difference here in the images after they've been converted to CMYK for print. The Call the Fated cover was created by using image layers with effects added to them to make them glow, as opposed to the lighting tree image that was created using brushes. The Fated cover lost its glow and the colors became muted when it was converted, while the lighting tree cover remained mostly the same, and very little of the coloring was lost when it was converted. Granted, for Wattpad this makes little difference since you won't be converting to the CMYK color profile, but it's a good thing to know if you plan on perusing a career in design. 

This is a cover I created for a user here on Wattpad. I used the moon brush to create the triple moon effect. The customer wanted specific colors for the moons and rather than attempt to find images it was much easier to use the brush. It creates a more seamless look and I didn't have to attempt to erase things and get the images to fit together. Many of the brush files come with an array of brushes. All three moons are different brushes that came in this set so it was easy to fit the three together.

There are many different styles of brushes. Some you need to purchase but there are still a lot of free ones out there.