Designing my digipak - Album Title

Having filmed the majority of my video, I decided to experiment with creating the album title for my digipak. When filming the performance element of my video, I had known that I wanted to take a series of pictures with my artist and that particular location to use for my digipak. The below images are different versions of one of the pictures that I took and is what I felt was the most effective image for a digipak. 

This first image was an experimentation of the features of Photoshop. I was able to play around with brightness, contrast, levels and exposure amongst other things. There were many elements of this image that I ultimately didn't like, the contrast of the image was far too dark and created an almost silhouette - like outline of the artist. Equally, the typography was far too bold, the 'stencil' effect juxtaposed the softness of the image, and I felt that the colour and placement of the type needed work as well.

The second image that I created, I felt was a great improvement to the first. I feel that the typography and placement of the type is far better and I kept this style and set up for my final album cover. The creativeness of the digipak, the colour scheme and style was rated quite highly by my target audience in the research that I carried out, therefore it was important for me to get this right. As a result, I decided to look back over my own digipak research, highlighting what I liked most in terms of style and colour. I established that it was vital for their to be synergy between the typography and the image, so I changed the font for a softer, more romantic font. I also matched the colours of the font to the colours of the image, lessening the opacity of the colour to give it a more 'faded' approach. Whilst I was pleased with this image, I still felt that the contrast was too dark and needed adjustment.

This is my final image, and will be the front cover for the album of my digipak. I am very pleased with this image and feel that it conforms to the generic conventions of the genre and will hopefully appeal to my target audience. To create this final image I needed to fix the darkness of the contrast/ shadow on my artist. Using Photoshop I experimented with the brightness and contrast features, levels and curves but this edited the entirety of the image, and not just the artist. To evade this problem I used the magnetic lasso tool to cut out the figure of my artist and layer via copy to isolate this part of the photograph, I was then able to lower the contrast of my artist with curves, and merge the layers back together to produce the final image. Furthermore, I feel that my final image encapsulates the message that I wanted to convey, it captures the classic, softer side to the song, and also shows off the more contemporary influence given the powerful stance of the artist and use of lighting which mimics a more modern album cover. Lastly, there is a sense of convergence between this photography and the music video, given that they were both shot in the same location which should connect the ideas of my music video with my artists identity, as is done by popular artists; whose album title's closely resemble the look/ style of their image within the first single released off of the album.