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3D Paperback Book

Online selling can be a tricky task. Not only do you have to have a great page and descriptive content, but people want to see something physical, something that they can get for their money. To that end, some designers happily charge big bucks to create things like software boxes and book covers for customers to display with their product.

Those who know me, know how much I detest the "elitest" attitude that many people develop towards things like Photoshop. I think that everyone should be able to do anything if they really want to. So, here's my latest attempt to give everybody access to "inside" knowledge: you can easily make virtual book covers yourself, without spending a dime.

Difficulty Level: Intermediate Time Needed: 30-40 Minutes
   
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1

New Canvas - Open Photoshop and create a new canvas that is sized about 250 x 360 pixels. You can fudge with these settings - the important thing is that you have a width that is quite a bit smaller than the height so that what you end up with is a longer, magazine or paperback style book. Make your background color white and the canvas RGB mode.

 
2

Main Image - Now, open the main image you want to use on your cover and place it on the canvas you just made. I will be using this image, from ClanTemplates.

 
3

Design the Cover - All book covers need text, and (hopefully) a little bit of graphically pleasing "stuff". Take a few minutes and design a book cover that pleases you. I've added two shapes and two brushes to my design, centering around colors that are already present in the main image. Then I added a title and author line. Seriously, you can do this quickly or spend hours on it - what matters is that the cover you end up with is pleasing to you.

 
4

Link Layers - Technically speaking, once the cover is designed you could go ahead and just merge all the layers into one and achieve the same effect as linking. The thing is that once you merge the layers, they're no longer editable. So, save yourself a headache and link them instead. What we're doing is making sure that any change in position that we make on one layer will happen - identically - on all the layers.

To link the layers, click the very top layer. Then, hold your shift key down and scroll to the bottom layer and click it. Ever single layer is highlighted. Now, click the icon that looks like a chain at the bottom of your layers palette, and they're all linked.

 

 
5

Rasterize & Canvas Size - With all your layers still highlighted, right-click one of the layers and choose the "Rasterize" option. This will make everything smooth and clean. And since you did it with everything still highlighted, you only have to do it once, rather than go through each layer rasterizing.

Now, to make life easy in our next step, we need to make the canvas larger. Click "Image" and choose "Canvas Size". Then, make your canvas sized at 200%.

 

 
6

Perspective - With everything rasterized, we're ready to add the 3D perspective to our cover. The rest of the book will be a snap once we have this in place. Click "Edit" and choose "Transform". Click "Skew". You will want to drag only the left handles downward, so that you end up with something like the illustration below.

Be forewarned, this is the only tricky step. It can be very difficult to make the top line of the book match the bottom line once you drag the first handle downward. Take a deep breath and give it your best shot.

 
7

Spine - We're ready to add the spine of our book. Using a shade lighter than the main color of your book, draw a rectangle above all your other layers. It needs to match up with the top and bottom edges of your cover, but it will be "straight". So pull the left sides up just slightly using Edit-Transform-Skew. You'll end up with something like this:

 
8

Back Cover - Now we want to add a back cover. Using the main color of your book, draw a rectangle above your background layer. Right-click to rasterize the shape. Then, use Edit-Transform-Skew to add perspective to this shape, as well. The top left corner will need to match up with the spine of your book, and the top right corner be pulled "in" so it looks like your book is open. You'll end up with something like this:

 
9

Pages - We're nearly done! To keep things easy, we'll make our "pages" based on the back cover. Right-click the back cover's layer and choose "Duplicate". Then, hit your layer styles (the little "f" icon in the bottom of your layers palette) and choose color overlay - white. This will give you a page that perfectly matches the shape of your back cover without any work.

With your "Move" tool selected, use the arrow keys on your keyboard to nudge the page into place:

 
10

Last Step! - All that's left is to duplicate your pages and keep nudging them until you have a book filled with pages. I added a black background, and wa-la! Success!

 
 

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