Editing my front cover

The first thing that i did when i started my front cover was add my image. This is the original image that i added:
The first thing that i wanted to do to the image was make the people and the balloons more prominent, one of the ideas i had to do this was the make the background of the picture out of focus or black and white. First i duplicated the layer, in case anything went wrong and then went to Filter, Blur, Box blur. This gave me the box shown below:

I then changed the radius of the pixel until it made my picture as blurred as i wanted it. This gave me a good blur without the picture becoming illegible meaning the reader would still be able to recognise the background.

After this i needed to make the people in the picture back in focus. To do this i took the other layer that i copied from the first and copied it again. On one of the copies i used the background eraser to slowly get rid of the background. This is the end product from this stage:

Once i had done this i needed to place this image over the top of my blurred background. As you can see, i erased the balloons as well so on the backup copy of the layer, i copied it again and cut out the balloons:

After layering these three layers and re arranging the layout of the pictures, i had this:

I could now start to add text to my image. After deciding on my font for my logo in a previous blog, i added the font to photoshop by downloading it from dafont.com and then opening it so that it opened in photoshop. I wrote the title out and changed the size of the font until it fitted well where i wanted it to go. I decided on font size 120, I then added the tag line 'They got it, we flaunt it.' underneath the title so that it fitted around my head. I added a bar code and issue number to fit in with conventions of magazines. After this i felt to really target my audience i needed a website, so i added this in the font Veranda.
My mast head was now complete so i started to add text to the rest of my magazine, i began with the main article. In a previous blog i explained how i wanted my band name to be personalised, so i'm going to add this logo to the front cover.

Continued in next blog.