Group - Brighton Recce Album Art

Brighton Reccie - Album Art

Final Image

Process

•  The original image taken on our reccie in Brighton is shown here. I decided to remove Kurtis and the bottom area from the image as it appeared to cluttered and wasn't an effective image. Instead I focused on the architecture of the building behind Kurtis.
• In Adobe Photoshop CC, I cropped the image to a square (3000px by 3000px) and resized the image to only display the area I wanted.
• Using two guidelines, I rotated the image to get the horizontal lines flat rather than at an angle.
• I then used the quick selection tool to select the concrete areas, and I duplicated this selection to a new layer above the original image.
• I then created an adjustment layer, with a clipping mask confining it to the concrete layer I just created. On this layer I colourised the image and boosted the saturation to turn the concrete red. This was key to me as it served as a link to the electro-swing style, which we identified as commonly using red as a focus colour. 
• I then created another adjustment layer and clipped this to the original image layer. I removed all saturation from this layer, turning it into a greyscale image.
• I wasn't very pleased with how the sky looked in the image, as the type of clouds made the image look messy. I fixed this by removing the sky with the quick selection tool and replacing it with an image I found online.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
• To create the title, I typed out the words in red with the font 'BankGothic Mid BT Medium' and arranged them to be central on the horizontal plane. I duplicated these layers, turned them black and rasterized them to allow me to add a Gaussian blur to the layer. I placed these layers beneath the red titles to create a drop shadow. I then duplicated the original text again, turned it white and decreased its size, placing it above the red text so that the red became an outline.
• Using the square creation tool I made 2 red rectangles to add emphasis to the title.
• I then opened up the Photoshop file in Adobe After Effects CS6, and using the Video Copilot Optical Flares plugin, created two optical flares on the image. One behind the building to create a bright light to illuminate and add colour to the sky, and another with just the radials above the building to blend the sky and the building together.

Evaluation

• I am pleased with the final image as I believe that I was successful in taking an image that was not perfect for our style and turning into an album cover that suited our accompanying video. 
• This process should influence our final album art by teaching us to plan our images more carefully, but also showing us the vast capabilities of digital image editing to alter an image.