Photoshop Tutorials

FREE Photoshop Tutorial for Designing Your Own Ebook Cover

Design Your Own E-Book Cover with this FREE Photoshop Tutorial

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In this tuto­r­ial, I will walk you through the tech­niques I have used to cre­ate this e-book cover.  Of course, there are sev­eral dif­fer­ent ways to approach this, a lot of which is basic or inter­me­di­ate Pho­to­shop skills. I will share a cou­ple inter­est­ing tricks that you can do to give your e-book that spe­cial shine.

So to start things out, let us cre­ate a new doc­u­ment with a 500 x 500 pixel can­vas.   We will leave all the set­tings at stock:
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The first thing we are going to start with is an image for the book cover.   In my exam­ple, we are work­ing on an e-book for inter­net mar­ket­ing, so I have cho­sen a stock pho­to­graph that reflected the sub­ject mat­ter to a degree.
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Now once I have pasted this stock photo into my can­vas, I am going to use Edit > Free Trans­form to resize the image within our 500x500 dimen­sions.  I am also going to dupli­cate this layer, then put a 100% opac­ity, color over­lay on the copy, group it as a new smart object, and ras­ter­ize the layer.
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Next, I will use the rec­tan­gu­lar mar­quee tool to delete the cen­ter of our copies layer.
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With that done, I will change the color over­lay on the copied layer to white and reduce the opac­ity slightly.  Using pro­fes­sional fonts, such as Segue UI, I then wrote the book’s title above, and the author is at the bot­tom in small points.
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Now to begin the process of add the 3d look and feel, let us cre­ate the side spine of our book.  Essen­tially, use the rec­tan­gle tool to cre­ate a book as tall the cover, but very thin.  Then type your book title and author and rotate the text ver­ti­cally.
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Once our lay­ers and set up, it is time to give the cover and the spine a 3 dimen­sional look by going to Edit > Trans­form > Per­spec­tive.
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Once you get the prospec­tive right, let us add a shine to our spine by using the Bevel and Emboss layer style on the spine.¬† Set the depth to 100%, size to 158px, and the soften to 16%.   Also, notice in the pic­ture that I have changed the angle to 6 degrees, and the alti­tude to 37 degrees as well.
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Next, we will use the Edit > Trans­form > Warp tool to give the spine or book a more real­is­tic book shape.  Sim­ply use the tool to make the top and the bot­tom of the spine curve out.

The last thing we will do to this book is give it a nice reflec­tion of itself.   To do that dupli­cate all the lay­ers, then group the dupli­cates into a new smart object and ras­ter­ize that layer.¬† Now go to Edit > Trans­form > Flip Ver­ti­cally and move the copy directly below your ebook.   Then, delete every­thing below the bot­tom third of the book, as in the pic­ture.
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Once you have done that, add a gra­di­ent to that layer as seen above, and reduce the over­all opac­ity of the later to 60%.   This give us our final image:
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