Test Shots and Edits.

Following my album art and digipak research, I decided to carry out too lots of test shots to see what would look the most effective. The first test I did was to replicate a 'hand-made' digipak, which would comply to the indie genre by looking 'unpolished'.

This is an unfinished version of a potential album cover, for which I used coffee

stained paper for the background,

which was then scanned into the computer. I used a digital SLR to take pictures of every day things such as signs, clocks, post boxes, etc. This was to comply

with the title 'this is the life' as it shows things that people see and experience on a day to day basis. I then imported the photographs into photoshop and used the magic w

and tool, lasoo tool and the eraser tool to remove the background from the image.

Here is an example of one of the images:

After removing the backgrounds from each of the images, I copied and pasted the images onto the image with the coffee stained paper, and used the saturation tool to desaturate the images, making them look less vivid and give them an 'older' look. I also decreased the brightness on each of the i

mages to

carry out a similar effect. I used the logo from the logo tests I had previously done, and used a colour scheme which

corresponds with the background. In the potential finished image, most of the space along the base line of the album art would be filled, and there would be further editing to the logo design to make it look more eye-catching and easy to read.

The second test I did was to create a slightly more 'polished' cover which would feature more edited photography. For these shots, I used face paint and costume on my model to create a mime character. This was to comply with our basic idea for our music video, which will tell the tale of two mime characters falling out of love. These shots were taken in a photography studio with professional lighting and a DSLR camera.

This is one of the images that I took, before it was edited in photoshop. When editing, I liked the black and white colours, however found the red-braces looked effective. In order to keep the braces red, I used the magic wand tool and copy and pasted the braces into a separate layer to the rest of the image. I then desaturated the first layer completely, to create a black image. I used the 'brightness/contrast' option to make the contrast between the black and the white more distinctive. I also used t

he 'burn' tool to make black eye make-up clearer, and used the cone-stamp tool to polish untidy parts of the image.

Here is the edited version:

I took a series of photographs with this model at various different angles, and carried out the same edits to create images that were fairly similar to one another. Here are some more edited images: