I was asked to make a book cover for a new mystery novel, that showed the main characters and gave the readers a feel for the historical period of the novel. The goal of the cover was to make an image that looked like an artist's image, not a photo, because the story takes place in Regency England, and they didn't have cameras then! At the same time, it was not supposed to look like an engraving. I have a very old copy of Poser (4.0) and the Michael character I got from DAZ during one of their specials. I used "Michael" as a base for the males and the basic P4 Woman for the females. Since I don't have a lot of Poser stuff, I did most of the compositing work in Photoshop. I arranged the characters (they were nude because I wasn't using Poser clothing) to make the grouping and pose them, as well as adjust the shape and expression of their faces. I used a movie maker's trick for two of the poses. The elderly man on the left, "Manfred Throckmorton", and the young man on the right "Sebastian Throckmorton", are looking at the golden Cross of Ramplet. But the Cross is a complex Bryce object and I could not import it into Poser. So instead I positioned a Poser prop (a ball) and posed these two characters to look at it. Then I deleted the ball and rendered each character individually to make several same size images for layers in Photoshop. They were on a "blue screen" so I could easily isolate them from their background. The golden Cross and the silver cross (worn by the central character "Darla") were made in Bryce and brought into Photoshop the same way. I finished up the image in Photoshop. I found some royalty free public domain images of period clothing, and the background is a royalty free public domain watercolor. Using the technique of "paper doll clothing", I cut out the clothes, colored adjusted them and added some shading and details. Then, using layers, I applied the clothes "over the nude characters as appropriate. I used some distortion and "liquify" tools to adjust the angle of the clothes and better fit the Poser characters. The basic Poser characters looked like mannequins, of course. To "fix" this, I air brushed face details (makeup, glasses, hair texture, beard shadow, skin lines, age lines) and created false shadows using the layer "drop shadow" options to give them a bit more 3D depth. I found this "compositing" technique was much easier for this project than trying to get Poser clothing and other Poser features, as I am not all that good with Poser. Oh, and if you want to learn more about the book, it's here: www.clydesight.com/cofr/ or type "Cross of Ramplet" in Google or any search engine.