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