Attached Link: The First....

Hello everyone, was wondering if someone with some experience with photoshop can give me some tips if possible.

I'm doing the cover for my first Sci-fi superhero novel that I wrote myself, I posted it in my gallery and I didn't get too good of a response.

I attached the link so that you can see it in my gallery and attached is the original render I created and was working on in Photoshop Elements 7.

The objective was for the person looking at the cover to say, "Is that a picture of a woman floating in space?"

So what I did was black and white the picture, chromed it out, duplicated the render, dropped the opacity and then moved the second opacity layer of the image over slightly going for a kind of holographic look. I was going to show the orginal render at the end of my book as a preview to the sequel I am also working on.

So basically what I am asking is did I achieve the objective I was going for, did I miss it entirely, and if I did what can I do to improve the image to achieve the effect I was going for.

All help and opinions are appreciated. Thank you.

Hi Ewers,

I thought you might want to hear from someone who designs book covers for a living, so I'm putting my two cents in.

1. Might I suggest a more conventional aspect ratio for your cover? Your cover is square, which is more like an audiobook cover than a standard book cover. If you're going to be self-publishing this to Kindle, I would recommend a 6 x 8 aspect ratio to better fit the Kindle screen.

2. Your objective is achieved somewhat — a person might say, "Is that a picture of a woman floating in space?" Actually, a person might be more likely to say, "What the...?" because they likely won't be as specific about what they're seeing; it's a little hard to tell what's going on in the image at first glance. If that's your objective, then it's mission accomplished.

That said, I don't think that's what your objective should be. I think a woman floating in space would be mystery enough for the viewer to wonder what the story is about, so the image should be much clearer than the filtered version. A casual browser of books won't be curious enough to wonder what the image is to give the cover more than half a second before moving on.

1. Whatever it is you do to the image for the cover design, never, never let the title and author name be swallowed up in the art like that. The text needs to be readable, not lost and hard to decipher. Here's a good test of whether your book cover works — grab a bunch of cover images from other books, and put your cover image in among them. How does your cover hold up compared to the others? Does it stand out? Does your eye immediately go to it in a positive way or to another book?

That's my two cents. Hope it helps. :)

I agree with Aprilgem. You want your cover to attract curiosity but also represent what's inside. The cover you made on the link doesn't do your book justice. Look at Sci-fi book covers and you'll find the image draws you in. Makes you want to open it up and find what's inside. Your cover is an advertisment and needs to be eye candy.

 Keep working on it & if you need to find an artist to do the cover....you are in the right community.

 Good luck,

      Orchid

Okay! After much POSITIVE criticism (thanks for kicking my butt guys and gals) I decided to go with the original rendered image with a lettering on the title and my name that will pop out...let me know what you think...if you like this one, if I need to tweak or change it, if the lettering sucks. Please let me know.

Well..... I think that you need to redo the image and make it more like a standard bookcover....taller than wide. And I would use lettering that uses a color present in the image such as the light blue on the edge of the world as well as a font that's more easily read. Also if you make the image taller you will have more room for a larger font.

Hope the creative criticism helps!

 ~ Orchid

Question...the orginal image was rendered 5000 x 5000...so how should I resize it ?

Copy it and paste it into a rectangular black box.