Spot the difference

Below is an example of what can be done with the clone stamp tool.


This tool is potentially very powerful if you have a texture you want to remove something from seamlessly.


To select the clone stamp tool go to the tool box and hold down the picture of a stamp then select clone stamp.

If you are working with a texture that has a regular pattern like a brick wall in the following examples it is important to make sure the Aligned box is ticked this will help line up what you are transposing. Once you have the image you want to edit loaded hold down the alt key with the clone stamp selected and the press the left mouse button over the part of the image you want to sample then start brushing out what you want to remove.

Below are 2 photos the first one is before clone stamp and the second is after see if you can spot the differences.

  

Before

After

CD Label design

I wanted to keep my DVD label really clean and simple with good use of white space.


I took some logos and branding that would be important from my main cover design and used them with a new photo of a McLaren F1 car to keep the theme going from the case.

Initially I started with a blue background but soon decided that grey was the way to go as it contrasted with the logos nicely and looked good behind the photo of the F1 car I had edited and resized.

This is the final look for the cd label.  Clean, minimalist  and clear what the disk is when its looked at in the console or in the case.

Above is the image I edited and cleaned up to make the F1 image at the bottom of the label.


I did this mainly with the magnetic lasso tool and the eraser zooming in close to get maximum accuracy. 

The final Game cover design

Im very pleased with my final cover design i feel it captures many things i looked for in my look and feel  ideas and wouldn't look out of place on a game store shelf. 

Final info-graphic touches

After setting the last part of my info-graphics I noticed that there were a couple of things missing from my rear cover these were A barcode, Microsoft logo, Dolby digital logo and a warning to those with photo sensitive conditions. 


I went online and acquired the correct barcode information & logos and set to putting them in my design.


Below is how they looked after I had pasted and used the transform tool to make them smaller  

After I had placed them I thought that the white backgrounds to the new images didn't look very good and spoiled the whole look so I decided to have a play with the controls in the layer styles for each image and found that I could make the white of the images transparent by adjusting in the Blend if section moving the "This layer" slider towards black which made the white section transparent. 

Below are the finished images after removing white

Rear cover info-graphics

On the rear of any game there is usually a section at the bottom that tells the user some technical information about the game this can be things like Amount of players, Screen resolutions supported, save game space required, age rating  & wether there is downloadable content available to extend the life of the game. 


Pictured below is such a section from an existing game 

At first I thought it would be possible to cut these bits from an existing cover but after a couple of attempts I decided to create my own in a new .PSD file and then copy and paste them in to the final game cover.


The way I went about this was to create a white slightly transparent box so the images would have a constant backing to sit on I then created a large white empty PSD and then drew a rectangle with rounded edges using the draw tools.

After this I then drew a rectangle with the tool in grey then marked it out with rulers so I could accurately draw the inner white rounded rectangle inside. This then gave me the right shape to enter the text in to so I could make my info boxes look just like the original ones used by Microsoft game developers.

The next stage was to add the text to each box and then paste them in to the main game cover. Just like the original images I used a bright green #00FF00 for technical information referring to game play and bright orange #ff6000 for information referring to the games online capabilities.  

After each of these was created I selected both the box and text layers and copied the merged image to the main game cover I set up some guides in the main drawing to get the spacing even just as it would be on a real game cover.  As I transferred each image I reduced the size of them all by 80% so they would be an appropriate size for my image.  I was aware that this would probably have to be done because of the size of the PSD I had created to make the images in.

The next stage was to cut and paste the age rating information which I was able to cut from an existing game. I was able to cut the one for the rear giving it a fine black outer boarder and the one for the front with a nice fine white outer boarder because it was going on to a mostly black background. 

Rear cover photo text

Once I had got the position and size of the photos the way I wanted it was time to find the right look for the text describing the photos.


The look I imagined was of the Polaroid photos that have been written on in Biro so i looked for a font and managed to get just the right font imaginatively called "Biro" pictured in the font book below. 

In Photoshop I used the text tool to type in what was required and then used the transform tool to rotate the text to it looked like it had been written on the Polaroid by hand. 

Examples below

Rear cover imagery

In my mind I had the feeling I wanted the rear cover to be as clean and minimalist  as possible while still providing screen shots and information which is important when the game is on the shelves of a store and someone picks it up to have a look.


I decided that I would cut out and paste a top down image of a current F1 car and then place the screen shots as if they were Polaroid's that had been thrown on the below image almost as if they were spy shots of the competition.


First I added the below image as the background 

After this I then took 4 screen shots that I liked and made them in to shots that look like Polaroid's first I opened one image and used the photoshop image information to see how big it was and then I took the width and height adding 40px to the total to the width, 80px to the height and then created a new image in photoshop to the new measurements making sure that the background colour was set to white and not transparent.

Once this was done I then added guides to the top 20px down and the left 20px in and used this as a template to create the white surround for each photo I then loaded in the photo's one at a time locked to the 2 guides and saved each one as a very high quality .jpg so minimal  quality was lost to then import in to the main design later on with the white surround 

Creating this

Once all the Polaroid style shots had been created it was time to lay them out on the back cover. 
When taken in to the main project it became clearer that the images needed to be reduced by around 30ish percent each to get the right size and feel.
As I reduced the size of each image I also gave them a varying amount of tilt so they would look like they had been thrown and slid across the image below.  

Transform toolbar

As I was laying the images out I started to think they looked a little flat with little effect that they  were photos that had been thrown on top of each other so I decided to use some drop shadow on the photos so that they would have a little bit more depth to the edges and would lift up a little like real Polaroid's would.

The way I added drop shadow to the images was by double clicking on each photo's thumbnail which brought up layer styles and then from the left of the window selected drop shadow and then double clicked on it to bring up the controls you see in the image below.

After the process was completed this is how the final imagery on the rear cover looked 

  

Finalising the front cover

Once I had decided on which colours and styling I liked for the fire on the front cover it was time just to add some information and extra detail to finish it off.


The first component I had to add was the F1 logo this is a registered trademark of Bernie Ecclestone & the FIA.
The importance of having this official logo to the game is massive because at a glance a F1 fan that hasn't seen any advertising could instantly recognise that this is the official game with all the accurate teams and cars within it.


After this I thought that the centre of the cover looked a little bare and a waste of space. So after thinking about what I could do that would add to the image and the information aspects of the cover I decided on a image of a Formula 1 car gearbox.
The reason for this is that the game contains alot of elements around tuning and setup of the car and I felt that the gearbox was a interesting nod towards these more advanced features. 

The way I achieved  the effect of the gearbox floating through the flames was by double clicking on the thumbnail for the gearbox in the layers window which open's the layer style window and from here you can adjust opacity and many other things below.

Playing with fire

After positioning the car over the fire image once I wondered what the fire would look like a different colour to contrast more with the red of the car so I selected the the invert option from the tool bar to see what they will look like in blue.

Adjustment Menu where the invert button is located.

Before 

After

After trying this spending some time looking at it and asking fellow students I've decided to stick with the original fire option because it does capture the feel i want better than the blue image. 

Snip Snip

After looking at my car image that I had selected for the front cover I noticed several things I would have to be aware of when cutting the image.

The first of these was the lack of contrast between the Car and the black background which told me I would have to select and then cut what I needed manually. On further inspection I noticed that most of the lines were straight in the image and I could use the  Polygonal lasso to cut it.

Image with low contrast between the car and background 

Selecting the Lasso tool from the menu 

Close up of menu selection

Beginning of selection round the image