Gift's Media Blog: Construction Post 5: Digipak post-production

The software we used to create our Digipak was Photoshop

The Digipak in the making

Angela and Thakshana
working on the Digipak

-The Green space on our digipak template was allocated only to the photo itself
-Blue was space allocated for ONLY text to spill over
-The Red line was the 'bleed line' where anything in that area would get cut off when printing

Composing our Photoshop work space in a colour coded manner like this was an idea influenced after our teacher had advised us about the images on CD covers usually getting cut off when printed, so to have bleed lines in order to prevent this. We colour coded the bleed lines to make this easier to see.

The creation of our Digipak was actually a very long process for us. Even though we had taken time beforehand to draw out a flat plan of it, decisions such as the right picture to use, the right backdrop to use for each panel etc. kept changing.

Stage 1: Flat Plan

Stage 2: the back cover, creating the
red borders and inputting starry background

Stage 3:do all that is in the gif
below then input into the front cover

Stage 4: after having a group meeting
and realizing there was no consistent
look to our album

Stage 5: After getting teacher feedback from our stage 3 digipak
that we couldn't leave one panel blank, we decided to make
one picture spread across the 2 inside panels, which still
created a consistent look

FRONT PANEL PROCESS

Front panel first/rough draft-
(made on Microsoft word)

Shortlist of group photos excl. the one above

We realized after fitting this particular photo into the front panel template that we didn't like this particular shot due to the space in between me and Thakshana, the brick dark background not maintaining a consistent look with the starry album back cover. Also with our squatted positioning it was hard to find space to fit both our logo and album name.

Initially we had planned to use our jean outfit group photos for the front but after seeing how bad the rough draft looked we decided to quickly look up other girl group album covers who were in our genre again and we started to see some similarities between them; especially across fifth harmony, who ended inspiring the final product of our outer digipak panels.

From this small collection of bands we looked up, we realized that most of them either have a classy look to them, with dressy clothes standing in direct address to the camera, or a white/one block colour background with simple text either on top or in front of the group.

Collection of girl groups
we looked at

We decided to adhere to this convention of girl group album covers and the best shot out of our shortlist above we found to be the the all black clothing one. The outcome following this change in decision helped us formulate a colour scheme that is synergistic with our website (black, white and red) and more synonymous with the "classy street" brand we wanted our band to have.

A Problem we overcame

BACK PANEL PROCESS

Me playing around with the size
of our jeans outfit photo for the
inside cover

Using the refine edge tool to cut
our models according to the red
border lines we create

A new skill I learnt during the editing process of the Digipak was the "Skin Smoothing effect", which is used to remove any blemishes, dark circles/ imperfections that makeup could not take care of. I was able to use a tutorial video below to help me work out how to smooth skin. I was then able to touch up all the band members faces in all the photos used on the Digipak.