Making a Mock Up DVD case

First I wanted to make a mock-up of the DVD cover this would be useful to get my ideas down and make it easier to refine. Above you can see the finnshed image. the rest of this blog entry will be talking through how it was made.

A new canvas using the 27.9cm x 12cm
I started by dragging in some rulers from the guides at the side of the canvas making sure I left the 4mm bleed lines. Marked in the spine in at 13.cm from left to right.
This made a template for where my cover image would go. I then loaded one of my desktop backgrounds a photo taken by the Hubble space telescope (wide view of Mystic Mountain) into a new layer

Then using the rulers I marked out and even box for the space background.
Selecting the add layer mask button. I selected the newly created mask and filled in the area outside the selection with the black to mask these areas out.  This revealed the photo below in that area.

Using A template I acquired online to layer on the system infomation boxs .
This gave me a means of quickly building the basic layout, to a standard to work with. I also used the eraser tool to removed any un needed bit from the dvd case template.
I will make my own for my final version.

I pulled a few logo off the star citizen website to use as place holder art.

I then loaded up the spacesuit woman image in a new window. Pressing Ctrl+ Alt + I, then changed the resolution to 300 pixels per inch.
The layer was duplicated.

Using the quick selection tool and selected the body. By using the refine edge tool, to get a good selection.  I then proceeded to removed all the back ground by pressing the layer mask button below the layer. Then with the mask selected, use the fill bucket with black selected outside of the selection. 

This then masked and makes the background transparent.
It was then placed back in to the DVD cover image as a smart object.
As it’s as mart object will allow me to scale the image to any size I wanted without losing quality,

The same step was followed for all five images in the front cover. The fighter ship had a brush strokes flitter from the flitter gallery.

The next step was using the text tool then type out star citizen. I then changed the font to Han Solo italics converted it to a Rasta image and used ctrl + alt + T to rotate it so it would fit on the spine of the cover.

I was pleased with how the image came out and it gave me a good guild line for what the finished product would be.