Front cover progress

So far I have edited an image that I deem suitable to be on my front cover (direct eye contact, neutral facial expression, medium shot). I did so by decreasing the saturation so that the it was slightly less colourful because I feel that would work better to highlight bold fonts. Then in order to increase the contrast in the image I played around with the contrast tool and experimented with curves. In any magazine it is fairly conventional for the person to be airbrushed so that blemishes etc are less noticeable, I spent a brief amount of time airbrushing to give a flawless finish.

I added elements such as the bar code, price and website to create a sense of realism as these are solid conventions of all genres of magazines. I chose a bold font for the masthead, which has been balanced out with the colour white so that it does not over power the image. I created slight shadows to enhance its significance. You often see the masthead cropped to look as though the subject is in the foreground, especially in fashion magazines - I emulated this technique for a more sophisticated feel. Beginning to experiment with fonts and colours, it has become clear to me what colour scheme etc looks the most appealing. Here are several different fonts I tried on the masthead although felt were unsuccessful: