The Making of the Cover to ‘Undercover Unicorn’

Scaling and Cropping

Both images were of the correct size to fit without resizing into the Photoshop cover master that I developed for my earlier short story ‘Mistaking the Dragon Mage’. Both required cropping to remove the areas to the left and right so the model would appear in the right half of the cover image.

Since this was to be a more ‘gritty’ story, I wanted a more ‘gritty’ look to the image. I didn’t like the original color saturation but I wanted to retain a portion of it because I didn’t want a strictly black&white cover.

To get the desired look, I overlaid the color image on the black&white image and dialed-down the transparency to bring down the color and more emphasize the black&white elements. It also toned down the coloration on the model’s skin, which is more like the way I imagined the character to look.

There are other effects involved here, regarding the eyes and the hair, which are explained in the next sections.