Designing a Full Jewel Case Package from Only One Photo: Creative Cropping

It's great when you have a big selection of photos to choose from when designing all the components for your jewel case package. After all, you need cover art, inside cover art, a disc design and don't forget about the traycard  You want full color, commercial results, but what if you only have one photo? Don't go scheduling a photo shoot just yet. I'm going to show you how you can crop that single image for all your layouts.

Let's say this is the only photo you have to work with. Maybe it's the only photo you like or the only one you could find. We can zoom in and crop this one photo in different ways. We change the shape and the focus of each version. We've discussed how changing fonts and type effects can give us different looks, but for this example, we're gonna stick with one basic text layout.

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I'm using the same shot basically for the cover and inside cover. I've cropped in so the artist fills the space, but for the inside, I've screened back to make the image pale. This allows me to overlay the image with text. Repeating the front image continues the brand to the inside of the project. The disc face is a much closer zoom of the artist's face. It's the same photo, but by cropping it we've changed the focus. For the back, we don't see much of the artist's face, but are now focusing on the guitar. Let's change the coloring on the photo.

For this example, I'm using the same cropped images, but I've changed the whole look of the project by changing the color. In Photoshop, I used the slider bar for saturation and turned it all the way down. I left the little bit of color in the text for contrast, but I really love how sophisticated the black and white, desaturated photos look with colored text. Now let's take this example to the other extreme.

Again, same cropped images, but a much different overall feel. This effect was achieved with that same saturation slider bar in Photoshop. This time instead of turning it to the lowest setting, I turned it all the way up.  No changes were made to the text or layouts. Using one photo shouldn't be viewed as a limitation. It actually allows for a complete package with very consistent branding. I hope you're starting to see that creating a professional, commercial product isn't out of your reach. Be sure to follow us, there's more to come!