Photoshop Book Cover Design

Book cover design Photoshop tutorial in less than ten layers

Book cover design generally takes longer to prepare for than it actually does to put together. It took me around 45 minutes to gather the elements I needed for the book cover and only 15 minutes to actually design it. I have kept the design very simple so that a beginner could achieve similar results. So, let’s cut the talk and show you how you can very easily design a book cover like the one above.

Book cover template

Now is the time to open up Photoshop and that book cover template we created in part one complete with guides for bleed that is set to CMYK so that our end result is print ready. Our book is based on a 5.5″ x 8.5″ end product. When you go searching for your images to use in your book, this translates to 1688 × 2625 pixels because of the difference between 300ppi print ready resolution and the web’s paltry 72ppi. So ensure that you find an image that meets those dimensions if you want an image that will fill up the full cover. In our example I only want an image that fits the width of our book so 1688 pixels was the minimum I could use. Why? Because if I attempted to size up a jpeg I would quickly see pixelation, which looks unprofessional.
I picked out my book cover fonts. I chose two – one for the author’s name and one for the book title. Never use more than two fonts on a book cover and the best practice technically would be to use one. That said, however, many books use two fonts, including Harry Potter to give you an example.

Book cover road image

Although it looks very different in our book cover I used a painting from a very talented artist I have been following of late, called Vanessa Van Eyk. You can look up Vanessa’s work here and do remember that if you use an artist’s work,  get permission even if your book cover is derivative of the original piece. Because we just used the painting for our example which has no commercial value whatsoever, I’ve given attribution. Ensure you get permission and attribute properly, or fall foul of copyright law with your actual book design. It could cost you more than your book ever makes!
You will notice that the painting above looks different to the end book cover design. That is because I did a fair amount of image manipulation of the image so it would fit with what I was looking to achieve. So what did I do? I’m glad you asked.
I opened up the image of the painting and dragged it onto my empty canvas for starters. I wasn’t happy with the color hues for this book cover so I tweaked the colors using a feature called “channel mixer”. Check out the image below to see how I got to channel mixer.

Once I was in channel mixer I simply adjusted the color profile on C, Y, M and K settings until I got the exact hue I was looking for. You can see the actual channel mixer tool in this image:

So now I have the shade I want, but the image still isn’t quite there. It is still too defined, meaning it needs to be in the background or it can take away from my main image. It also has  a big black cloud that I don’t want, so I will need to edit it further. Step one, use some blur. Photoshop has eleven types of blur effects and I would encourage you to play with them all. In this case, I already know I need motion blur for the effect I’m after on this cover. To get to the “motion blur”, click on “Filter” on the top navigation and then mouse over the blur settings, clicking “motion”.

Now there’s just the issue of that big black cloud that needs to disappear. Easy! Well, easy if you know how. I simply right click on the “layers” panel and then duplicate the layer. If you do not see the layers panel on the bottom right of your screen go up to the top navigation, hit “window” and select “Layers”. After duplicating the layer I create a mask of this second layer. The image below shows you how to do that.

If you are wondering what a mask is, it is simply a way to hide portions of a layer. It uses the “key” feature in Photoshop, meaning anything painted, or colored with black becomes transparent. I then clicked on the new mask, which is the white box to the right of our layer image in the layers navigator, and then selected the paint brush tool. I went into the paint brush properties and changed the size and hardness settings like this:

Now that we have a layer mask we can get rid of that cloud. But first we have to employ one more trick. We need to flip our new layer horizontally. To do this, we simply goto the top navigation bar and click “Edit” and then mouse over “Transform.” You can now see the “Flip Horizontal” command. Go ahead, click it! Now we need to click back into our mask layer and select the paint brush tool again and we can start to reveal the image beneath our new layer. I start from the left hand side, revealing the image to the center. Then I simply line them both up until the left hand side of the original image is reflected. You will be pleased to know the hardest bit of our book cover is now behind us. I now have an image that looks something like this:

Now we have to ensure our background blends into our image. Luckily, this is easy to do. In your left hand menu you will see the color picker. Click on either color and it presents a color selection tool. All you now have to do is click on your image towards the bottom and select the darkest color you can find. Then simply double click on the background layer and select the “Color Overlay” option. You then click on the current color and which then turns your cursor into a color dropper and you click it on your color pallet in your right hand menu. The result should look something like this:

Adding a silhouette to your book cover design

The more technical part of designing our book cover is behind us. Although what we have looks a long way off the finished design, we only have a couple of more steps to go. Free silhouettes are abundant online and I would encourage you to do a Google image search to find one that meets your needs. Ensure the silhouette you download is a PNG or a PSD. You want the background to be transparent so you do not need to cut the image out. The silhouette I used wasn’t from an image search though. I found a photograph of a woman hitchhiking and cut that image out in Photoshop and then dragged the cutout  image into Adobe Illustrator and vectorized it as a shape. You don’t need to go to those lengths though. I may do another post at another time that focuses on cutting and vectorization of images and shapes, but it is too lengthy for this post.
When you have opened your silhouette in Photoshop drag the image onto your book cover design and size and position as you wish. Remember to keep space for your text and allow room for some negative space which allows your book cover to not look cluttered. Now double click on your silhouette layer and color fill it to the same color as the bottom of your book cover design. You should now have a book cover that looks like this:

Using brush shapes in Photoshop for your book cover

I wasn’t completely happy with the gradient between the painting and the black bottom of the book cover, so I decided to add a break within the two images that would tie them both together. I did this using a paint brush effect in Photoshop. Again free paint brushes for your book cover are just a Google search away. Something like “Free Photoshop paint brushes” should do the trick. When you have found some you are happy with download them.
I’m a Mac user so to install a paint brush I simply goto applications, go into the Photoshop folder, select presets and within that folder I see the Brushes folder. I then copy a new paint brush .abr file into the folder and then head back into Photoshop. Then go to the top navigation and select “Window” and select “Brush” to show your brushes. You now need to load the new brush. At the side of the brush panel you now see on the right of your screen is a small arrow pointing downwards. Click that arrow and select “Load Brushes” and navigate back to that folder in which you placed your new brush set and select it and click load. You now have your new brush.
Windows users find the Brushes folder by navigating through, C:, Program files/Adobe/Adobe Photoshop CS5 (Or whatever version you are using)/ Presets/ Brushes.

I selected my paint brush and made sure the color was set to white. I then created a new layer. The image below shows how to add a new layer.

Once I had my new layer in place I selected the paint brush tool in the left navigation and painted my new brush design straight onto the new layer I had created. Then all I had to do was to lower the opacity of the layer down to 63% and then add a color overlay by double clicking on the new layer and then selecting color overlay from the options. I color picked a brown color from the painting and clicked OK.
The paint brush I decided to use had a look of fire about it. I wanted to communicate passion and danger in the book cover and this met my needs. Now all I need to do is add my text and the book cover is complete! Incidentally, so far we have only used 5 layers. I know we will need a few more layers for the text, but this is still a very simplistic image, despite all the processes we have been through to create this image for a book cover.

Adding text to your book cover

We want to use a bold font so it can be read even when the image is sized down in an e-book store. For the title I selected a font called Libel Suit. I wanted there to be a lot of contrast so the cover stood out from others so I decided to make the text red. The actual shade of red has the hexadecimal value of #e72d2e. I wrote each word on a separate text layer and then positioned them so they ran in to each other.
Now all I needed to add to the book cover was the authors name. The font I selected was Lithos Pro. I decided coloring the font white would again add a lot of contrast which should make the text stand off from the book cover image. I centered the text on the cover and that was that.

We are done, all we need to do now is save our cover. Well, in fact you will need to save frequently during the designing of your book cover. We now need a couple of different formats. First, save your file as a .psd, which is Photoshops native file format. We may need to edit the image, text or add a barcode later. Then save as a .jpg or JPEG so we also have a web ready format. Many printers will also require you to have a .pdf version so you may as well save the book cover design as a PDF also. Here is the final book cover design without the guides.

So you could view the book cover in context I then created a template and rendered the new book cover design in a 3D application so you could see how it would look as a book.

Summary
You can design yourself a great cover for your book. Don’t allow Photoshop to intimidate you. Think about what you want to design and communicate before you start. Use the best practices I have laid out in the three posts and be sure to use contrast between imagery and text to create an eye catching design that will draw the eye away from other books. My design took less than 15 minutes but I am a trained graphic designer and if this was a real book cover I would have taken more time on it and changed a few items. I would say to allow your self an hour or two, and remember you can always come back to it and edit it at a later time.
We will do more book cover design tutorials here on Authorage in the future where I will take you through more complex designs that have a lot more than 9 layers and will take you through some photo manipulation. I hope you have found this book cover de