Second graphic: Magazine Cover

This is the second graphic product I made which is supposed to represent the front page of one of the catalogue for skiing the company sells. The catalogue is named "WhiteBook" and the 26 represents the volume. The other text like "Winter 12/12" and "£3.99" were made up to make it seem more like a magazine front page.

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How I made the background

This is the original skiing stock image of Switzerland that is used by most of the travel websites. For the mountain image on the top of the title, I used a stock photo uploaded by ForsakeWolf so all credit goes to her. The link for the photo and her DeviantArt ID can be found here: http://forsakewolf.deviantart.com/art/Mountain-Stock-14-167293414?q=boost%3Apopular%20mountain%20stock&qo=20.

I first placed the second picture as the background image and copy and pasted the skiing image afterwards. So, the layers looked like this. The images were overlapping one another:-

I added the layer mask on the first image and used the gradient tool. If a part is painted when the mask is active, any other image lying underneath it becomes visible while the picture with the layer mask loses its visibility on that part. This is how it looked like after using the black and white gradient tool:-

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How I made the text:-

After finishing the background, I moved on to adding the text bit.The text "WhiteBook26" uses filter and image adjustments technique to make it look like it is dripping ice. First, I coloured the whole text white and Rasterize the layer. The layer needs to be rasterised in order to make any changes to it. Then, I went to Filter> Pixelate> Crystallize and then set the Cell Size to 10. 

After that, I went to Filter> Blur> Guassian Blur and put 1.5 as the Radius for mega pixels. Then, I went to Image> Rotate Canvas> 90 CW. This step is necessary as one of the filters need to work on the down part of the letters to produce that spiky ice effect. To create the spiky ice effect, I went to Filter> Stylize> Wind. Blast and From The Right needs to be highlighted here for it to work. 

To return the image back to its normal state, Image> Rotate Canvas > 90 CCW. To give the blueish white colour to the text, I went to Image> Adjustments >Hue/Saturation and simply increased the Hue a bit. Colourize needs to be selected. 

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Barcode and Other Text

After that, I added the logo and other simple text where I haven't made any huge changes. For the bar code, I generated my own by going to this website:- http://barcode.tec-it.com/ and added it to my magazine cover.

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