Cover Design Software

[Nihal]

InDesign is a layout software from Adobe. It's the best I could find to do internal pages, and it can be used to make the layout of covers, but it's not optimal to do the artwork itself.

If you're interested in painting programs you should check PaintTool SAI if you haven't already. It's a light program that can be easily used from a pendrive, with a native color wheel, a great support to vector edition (for a painting program) and in a world full of expensive softwares it's cheap. It has some downsides too like not handling text as it should, and crashing if you try to do a super-print-size work, because it still has not a 64bits version.

In any case it's worth checking. They offer a 1 month trial, I think.

 

[psychotick]

Hi Guys,

It's been a while since I added to this. I meant to get back to it, but was busy. However, now that The Godlost Land is finally finished and published, I have a little time on my hands. So I thought I'd give you another of the programmes I often find myself using - Photofiltre 7.

PhotoFiltre Studio

Look this is simply a photo editing application. It has a lot of filters, and batch processing, and all the usual stuff. A couple of the filters are unique to it. And of course it's free. But by and large it's not as good as Photoscape.

However, it does have one party trick up its sleeve that leaves everything else in its dust. A simple colour replace system where you simply pick a colour, replace it with transparent, and hey presto you're done. Want to put a jumbo jet in a field? Simply take your picture of the jet, transparent the background, and then simply lay the image over another. It's literally a two minute job - and it does it well. It doesn't seem to mess up the borders like a lot of other programmes do, leaving you with little to clean.

Cheers Greg.