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Cover Design Software

Hi Guys,

Thought since I have time on my hands that I'd start a new thread about the various bits of software I and others use to design our covers. (One program at a time.) I use about half a dozen different programs, all with their own strengths and weaknesses. My thought is that others might chip in with their own posts about different pieces of software.

So to begin I thought I'd start with Photoscape. (Note this is not Photoshop - which I don't use.)
PhotoScape : Free Photo Editing Software (Photo Editor) Download

Photoscape is pound for pound the best photo imaging piece of software out there in my view - and it's free. It's fully featured and has an amazing array of filters and effects you can add to your images, all of them very simple to use even without a manual. And it'll do things on the fly so you can see the changes you're making in an image as you make them instead of having to undo changes after. It also has some spot fixing tools - badly named for some reason as the Region (out of focus) filter. But want to simply darken, blur, decolour or sharpen one tiny bit of an image - this will do it for you. It also has an image pasting / overlay system which is a little cubersome but allows for variable transparency of the entire image. So you can put ghostly eyes etc over an image.

One thing I particularly like is that it can build covers for you. So for a full cover I want three panels - front, back and spine. Photoscape will allow me to make three seperate images, size them exactly to the nearest pixel, and then connect them up into one full sized image.

It does have some weaknesses. The text for blurbs doesn't allow for justification - which means if you want a justified blurb you either have to fiddle with the spaces / kearning yourself or import a text file. It can't do a ingle colour to transparent as can other programs - but it can handle images with transparent colours. So simply import a png file with transparent colour embedded and Photoscape will handle it like any other image. And its choice of fonts is essentially that which comes with Word etc. It's not a full text graphics suite so you'll want to create those in another program and insert them. It doesn't do layering either. Lastly it won't do a pdf which may be an issue with some publisher requirements - however I find JPEG's are just as good and a quarter of the size.

All in all this is my workhorse graphics design program.

Cheers, Greg.
 

Foah

Troubadour
Adobe Photoshop cs6 is still my favorite software when it comes to designing digitally. It's the expensive big guy, but it's the expensive big guy for a reason. The stability, control and massive amounts of add-ons and plugins - all these features make photoshop bar none in my opinion. I've used Photoshop since the Creative Suites were first introduced, and I've never felt compelled to change. However, while Photoshop is my first choice when it comes to compiling and editing the cover, I feel that there are many other ways to work with cover art, other programs that might work better with styli.
 
If you mean for painting or designing the artwork - then photoshop no question (though Artrage has some great features and is a lot cheaper).

But if you mean laying out the cover, adding text etc. then Adobe Indesign is infinitely better than photoshop (in fact its the best piece of layout software I've ever used and I can't recommend it highly enough). It's easy to get to grips with and with its style-based approach easy to knock up countless variations quickly.

It does have an initial learning curve to get the best out of it - but it's so far above all the other software I've tried for layout that I would never use anything else.
Illustrator runs it second best and is ok for single sheets (such as covers) but it's a long way behind. (Photoshop is a very distant third place as its so damned inflexible).
 
To explain in a bit more detail - The reason I put photoshop so far back is it doesn't handle fonts well. (Illustrator doesn't either really - but it's better than photoshop.)

With Indesign you can define a paragraph and character style and then apply that anywhere you want. Updating the style changes it everywhere those styles have been used. (Style is colour, font, font size, outline, shadow, kerning, skew, offsets, line spacing, - everything you could possibly want).
You can similalrly define graphic styles for text boxes, lines etc. which work in the same way and have extensive properties.

This makes it really easy to layout your cover and try out different configurations in seconds as changing the style changes it globally.

Indesign itself is resolution independent - you can also output the finished files as bitmaps or pdfs at any resolution you want - which is a lot easier than photoshiop where you're working at the resolution of the bitmap image itself. If anyone wants to know more let me know. Maybe I should put together a tutorial on creating a book cover in indesign? Message me if anyone's interested.
 
Hi,

I've never used photoshop and I probably never will. I've heard many good things about it. But when the program costs over a thousand kiwi count me out. That may be the right price to charge a professional design business for the software but for your average home user it's simply ludicrous. As ludicrous as Microsoft charging similar amounts for office (as they still do I believe unless the software comes with a new computer).

I could I suppose in theory look at a pirated copy, but would never do that. I'd rather be honest and use other products. Sorry Adobe - no sale - ever.

Cheers, Greg.
 

Steerpike

Felis amatus
Moderator
MSOffice is $9.99 US per month now. If you want to buy it outright, it'll run you around $150.
 
Photoshop is part of the creative cloud now - if you're in education (either teacher or student) you can get the creative cloud relatievly cheaply (and that's every adobe product). If not then you can get photoshop elements you can get it for a monthly fee.
There's also photoshop elements - which is a lot cheaper.
 
Adobe did release CS2 free a couple of years back - ostensibly for previous users only - but there was no restriction on downloading it from their website and I know of lots who have done it.

Adobe seem to be turning a blind eye to this (lets face it it gets them users of their software - so they're not losing out at all - and the software is 10 years old)

You might still be able to do it - if you want to follow the instructions here:

Download Adobe Photoshop CS2 For Free Legally While You Still Can [Tutorial] | Redmond Pie

Note this is NOT pirated software - its totally kosher and not illegal - its downloaded directly from Adobe themselves - the link just tells you what you need to do (Adobe understandably aren't yelling too loudly about this).
 

Steerpike

Felis amatus
Moderator
Yeah, Adobe Photoshop CS2 is pretty cool, despite being a bit older. Also, you might take a look at GIMP, which is free, open-source software.
 

Ruby

Auror
Hi psychotick,

I find this interesting as I recently bought a Wacom tablet to use with my PC. The trouble is, that they don't give you any software if you live in the UK. If you live in the USA you receive free Photoshop! How unfair is that!

Fortunately, "Paint" works with it, but it's a bit limited.

To be honest, I've only used the Wacom a couple of times as I've been using apps on the iPad to do artwork.

Can you buy the old versions of Photoshop?

I looked at the link that Terry Greer has posted above, but people have left comments on the site that it's only for exiting users. :confused:
 
Hi Ruby,

Sorry, don't know about photoshop. But in a bit of a spoiler alert since I plan I discussing these other free graphics programs in due course, GIMP, Paint.net (not to be confused with MS Paint), Libre Office Draw, PhotoFilter and Dreamlight Photo Editor are all free, and all can do things that the others can't.

Cheers, Greg.
 
That's what they say officially Ruby - but it used to be that you'd just register with Adobe and download it and it would still work. Adobe don't care - its a decade old software and it gets people using it (and the new features of the current software are fantastic) so it acts as an upgrade path (for people who can't afford the regular CC suite) - they just don't advertise it as such.

I'd suggest registering with adobe and seeing if it's downloadable still.

You can get a free month trial with adobe CC as well - well worth it to see what the new features are.
 

Devor

Fiery Keeper of the Hat
Moderator
I have both Photoshop Essentials and PaintShop Pro XII, each of which ran about $90 when I bought them. Photoshop Essentials is by far the more powerful of the two, but PaintShop Pro has one or two cool features which I'd gotten used to. Either of them are more than capable of creating a cover out of stock art, and even as an amateur I've been able to do similar projects effectively without a problem.

The software definitely makes a difference. But it still comes down to your abilities as an artist to visualize what you want to accomplish with the project and understand how to manipulate the tool to get you there. I wouldn't recommend it, but you could make a compelling cover from just Microsot Word or Paint if you know what you're doing.
 
Hi Guys,

It's been about a week since my first post on this, so I thought I'd go to the next piece of software I use. This one however as reviews go, is very short and sweet.

The software is actually a site which does on line logos and banners (Read headings, titles etc) It's called Cool Text Cool Text: Logo and Graphics Generator

Now there are no real down sides to this program. It is free, simple to use, and while there are maybe only thirty or forty (I haven't counted) different choices of text style, each one is able to be formatted for colour etc. The program provides the text as a png file with transparency added so you can simply overlay it on whatever you want. (Just remember to save it as that).

As a limit it can only handle so many words (twenty maybe?) in each graphic. And you should be aware that if you have text over two lines the program will treat it as one. By this I mean that if you choose a style that has multiple colours over it - say it's green at the top and gold at the bottom running in a continual colour spectrum, the bottom line of your text will be gold and the top line green. This means that you can't simply add another line of text and have it as part of the pattern - as you might want to do if your title's that big. A better option would be to do each line as a separate graphic.

However these are minor things.

I would urge all of you looking at cover design to take a look at the site, and have a play. It's actually quite fun typing in your text, making your choices and seeing what you get.

Cheers, Greg.
 

Anniekins

Dreamer
Hi psychotick,

I find this interesting as I recently bought a Wacom tablet to use with my PC. The trouble is, that they don't give you any software if you live in the UK. If you live in the USA you receive free Photoshop! How unfair is that!

Fortunately, "Paint" works with it, but it's a bit limited.

To be honest, I've only used the Wacom a couple of times as I've been using apps on the iPad to do artwork.

Can you buy the old versions of Photoshop?

I looked at the link that Terry Greer has posted above, but people have left comments on the site that it's only for exiting users. :confused:

hi,
photoshop is marvelous, i love it, ive been playing with it for a few years and use it for painting, making banners etc. also have a wacom tablet and pen. i saw a post earlier about cs2 being free legitimately as far as i know that still stands.
 
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Ruby

Auror
hi,
photoshop is marvelous, i love it, ive been playing with it for a few years and use it for painting, making banners etc. also have a wacom tablet and pen. i saw a post earlier about cs2 being free legitimately as far as i know that still stands.

Hi Anniekins,

I was wondering whether to use one of the other free programs although I haven't tried any of them, yet.

I've found the iPad does most of what I want and is brilliant for artwork.
 

Nihal

Vala
Photoshop is a very flexible software indeed. I use it to do the majority of the artwork side of covers, ebook covers and mock-ups.

However, it's nice to have a software that can naturally handle vector outlines and Illustrator can do that for you. InDesign also can, but it's not as gentle to imported images as Illustrator is. Sometimes you'll need to export the cover to other format than image ones to print it, and the text and other flat designs elements on the cover must be in vector format to make sure it looks sharp and good. You can do something like that in Photoshop, but it's not easy and intuitive.
 

Anniekins

Dreamer
I've not heard of InDesign, i'll check it out. I love all programs for artwork. it's great to have so many options. thanks.
 

Devor

Fiery Keeper of the Hat
Moderator
I've not heard of InDesign, i'll check it out. I love all programs for artwork. it's great to have so many options. thanks.

InDesign is mostly for laying out print works like textbooks, magazines or newspapers. But it's part of Adobe's CS suite, so it overlaps a lot with the others.
 
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