• Contact
  • Account
    • Become an Affiliate
    • Sign Up for Deals

    • Login
Book Cave: Authors and Publisher promotional services and features
Book Cave
Authors & Publishers
Connecting the RIGHT readers with the RIGHT books
  • About
    • Book Cave Reviews
    • Who We Are
      • Mission
      • In the Works
      • Book Cave Logos
      • Meet the Ratings
    • Privacy Center
      • Privacy & Terms
      • Your Privacy Rights
    • Affiliate Program Agreement
    • Trademarks
  • Current Deals
    • Deals from Retailers
    • Book Cave Direct Deals
      • Exclusive Ebook Downloads
      • Free Group Deals
    • Giveaways
      • Win a Free Ereader!
      • Last Giveaway Winner
      • Past Winners
  • Readers
    • Sign Up
    • Rated Books Database
    • Rate a book I’ve read
    • Browse Author Pages
    • Reader FAQ
    • Reader Blog
    • Giveaways
      • Win a Free Ereader!
      • Last Giveaway Winner
      • Past Winners
  • Authors
    • How It Works
    • Our Services
      • Feature Your Book
      • Group Features
      • Subscriber Magnet Services
      • MBR Ratings
      • Create an Author Page
    • Submission Guidelines
    • Pricing
    • Submit a Book
    • Create Account
    • Become an Affiliate
    • Author Resources
      • Author Blog
      • Author FAQ
      • Promotion Tips
      • Cover Guide Calculator
  • Book Swag
  • Contact
  • Account
    • Become an Affiliate
    • Sign Up for Deals

    • Login
  • About
    • Book Cave Reviews
    • Who We Are
      • Mission
      • In the Works
      • Book Cave Logos
      • Meet the Ratings
    • Privacy Center
      • Privacy & Terms
      • Your Privacy Rights
    • Affiliate Program Agreement
    • Trademarks
  • Current Deals
    • Deals from Retailers
    • Book Cave Direct Deals
      • Exclusive Ebook Downloads
      • Free Group Deals
    • Giveaways
      • Win a Free Ereader!
      • Last Giveaway Winner
      • Past Winners
  • Readers
    • Sign Up
    • Rated Books Database
    • Rate a book I’ve read
    • Browse Author Pages
    • Reader FAQ
    • Reader Blog
    • Giveaways
      • Win a Free Ereader!
      • Last Giveaway Winner
      • Past Winners
  • Authors
    • How It Works
    • Our Services
      • Feature Your Book
      • Group Features
      • Subscriber Magnet Services
      • MBR Ratings
      • Create an Author Page
    • Submission Guidelines
    • Pricing
    • Submit a Book
    • Create Account
    • Become an Affiliate
    • Author Resources
      • Author Blog
      • Author FAQ
      • Promotion Tips
      • Cover Guide Calculator
  • Book Swag
Cover Design,Tutorials
27 Oct 2016 at 07:35 PM PDT
Updated 1 year ago

Cover Design Part 2: Setting up Your File and Image

By Catia Shattuck

Advertisement

JutohWe at Book Cave prefer Jutoh for ebook creation because it gives us more control than most other ebook software out there, while still maintaining a friendly interface.

Browse by topic

All Posts Technical Tips Writing for Authors Ebook Formatting Grammar & Punctuation Publishing Tips Author Website Promotion & Marketing Social Media Mailing Lists Cover Design Tutorials Author Pages

Cover Design

I'm a book wyrm
We hope you enjoy reading this post!
If you’re like us and love to read, then click here to score tons of free and discounted ebooks.

Now that you’ve chosen your image for your cover, what do you do next?

In this tutorial, we will be using Photoshop to create the entire cover; that way, all the photo editing and the cover design will be done in the same program. You can also use a different photo editor, or you can edit the image in Photoshop and place it in InDesign to do the rest of the designing. Do whatever you feel most comfortable with.

Create your document

First, create your document by going to File –> New. In the dialogue box, choose “inches” for your dimensions and put in the size of your book.

cover design - Document Setup

If you’ve already created a typeset book for print, this is easy—just use the same dimensions you used for your book. If you haven’t yet, or are planning on only selling your book as an ebook, here are three common book dimensions for fiction books: 5 x 8, 5.5 x 8.5, and 6 x 9. If your book is on the shorter size, you may want to go with the smaller dimensions, so your book looks bigger when printed, and vice versa. All the books in one series should have the same page dimensions.

If your cover design is for a print book, you’ll need to include the spine and the back cover in your file. You’ll also need a bleed—an area where the image can “bleed” past the trim lines in case the printer doesn’t cut the image exactly on the lines (because no printer is perfect). A bleed should be .125 inches all around your page. I do suggest adding these even if you’re not sure you want to produce a print book, because it’s much more difficult to add a spine, back cover, and bleed after the fact than to do it from the beginning.

To add the spine and back cover, double the width (to include the back cover) and add the width of the spine. You can get the width of the spine by multiplying the number of pages by .002252 (this is the regular paper width with KDP, but it will be different if you decide to use a heavier paper, so check with the printer you are using for the exact number). For the bleed I mentioned above, you’ll need to add an additional .25 inches to both your document’s width and height (.125 inches all around).

So, let’s say my book is 5 x 8 and is 250 pages long. My document width would be 5 (front cover) + 5 (back cover) + .563 (spine) + .25 (both bleeds), for a total of 10.813 inches. The height would be 8 (length) + .25 (both bleeds), for a total of 8.25. If you’re not sure how many pages your book has, you can guesstimate—the spine size can be changed later by changing the page dimensions. Generally, if you have to guess a width, it’s best to make the size slightly wider than you might need, because trimming is easier than adding width later.

Creating a bleed and a cover spread is much easier in InDesign (it’s part of the document setup), but we will stay in Photoshop for this tutorial to avoid throwing you into too many programs.

NOTE: Since most books will be released in print and ebook, you must have your resolution at 300 pixels. This will guarantee that the cover will look as great printed as it does on the ebook screen. For the ebook, you will actually size your cover down before uploading. For more details on that, see our tutorial about sizing finished images for ebook.

Place guides to mark your trim and bleed

If you created a document with a bleed (which I suggest you do, so you don’t have to end up redoing your cover if you decide to print it), you’ll need to place guides so you’ll know where the cover will be trimmed after it is printed. In Photoshop go to View –> New Guide, and type .125 into the position. Create a vertical and a horizontal guide with this position. This will place your left and top guides right on the trim line.

cover design - Guide

The rest of the guides require a little bit of math! You want your right and bottom guides to be .125 away from the edges. For my document, that means I need a vertical guide at 10.688 (my total width of 10.813 – .125) and a horizontal guide at 8.125 inches (my total height of 8.25 – .125).

This process will place guides at .125 away from all your edges. Any element that is meant to extend to the edge of the page (bleed) needs to extend past these guides. But don’t put anything important there because that is where the printer will trim the cover.

You’ll also want guides to mark where your spine will be. These will be vertical guides. The first is the regular width of your cover + .125 (the left bleed), so my first guide would be at 5.125. The second guide will be placed at the width of your cover + .125 (the left bleed) + your spine width, so my guide is placed at 5.688.

Here’s what my document looks like so far!

Cover Design - Page Setup

Keep in mind that the printer may not fold the cover perfectly either, so you don’t want text too close to the spine edges. If it helps, you can put two more guides inside the spine area that are .062500 inches away from the spine edge.

If you don’t want to do all this math, check out our cover guide calculator here.

Place your image

To place your chosen image into your cover design, open the image in Photoshop and drag out the window so you can see both the cover and image file. Then (using the black selection tool) drag the image over to your cover file. Doing this will insert the photo at its actual size, so don’t drag out the corners to make it bigger; that will cause pixelation. Also, don’t use the Place option in the file menu because that will place your image as a smart object, which you don’t want. (In InDesign, you do use Place, so that may be confusing if you are familiar with InDesign.)

One pitfall new cover designers often fall into is only partially filling up the page with their image, then using a colored box around the image to fill up the rest. This more often than not just looks tacky and unprofessional.

Which of these books would you be more likely to pick up?

Cover Design  Cover Designbad

I would much prefer the first one! So make sure your image is big enough (at a good resolution) to fill up the page. Again, don’t stretch it out unless you only do an ebook. Otherwise on print, it will look pixelated.

Manipulate the Image

We can’t cover all the amazing things you can do with Photoshop in this one tutorial, but here are some things we’ve found the most helpful when designing covers. For all the images, feel free to right click on them to open a full size image in a new tab.

Here’s the image I’ll be manipulating for this tutorial:

Cover Design Image

Layers

Photoshop is a great program because it has layers. All the tools I’m going to be showing you use different layers; that way, if you want to adjust something further, or turn it off completely, you can do so because each element and adjustment is on a different layer. If you’re putting two images together, they will be placed on separate layers when you drag each into the same file. You can adjust the opacity of a layer to make an image slightly see through, or you can change the “blending mode” to get different effects (the default is “Normal,” but you can get some interesting effects with changing it to “Overlay”).

Cover design Layers

Clone Stamp Tool

I decided to use the entire image as a spread, so the left side will be the back cover. If your image isn’t long enough to do this, don’t worry. You can use another image for the back cover, or you can just use a solid color.

For my image, I don’t like the bike wheel showing up in the corner, so I used the clone tool to get rid of it. You could also get rid of the sign on the back of the bench. The tool works by holding down alt + click to “sample” the image, then releasing alt and just clicking to paste the sample over another part of the image. Using the clone tool takes some getting used to, so try not to get frustrated!

Cover Design Clone Tool

 

Important: If you choose a soft brush after clicking on the clone tool, it will make the new patch connect more seamlessly. You can also adjust the size of the tool. See image below where I’ve changed the size from 45 to 33. The first brush is the best option for beginners. (Basically, the clone stamp “brush” has the same options as the eraser tool.) After using the clone tool, you can use the healing brush tool (it looks like a band-aid) to smooth out any ragged edges, if needed.

Capture of clone tool brush

 

The clone tool and the healing brush tool are also great to use if you’re trying to blend two images together. Another great tool is the patch tool (often grouped with the healing brush tool): simply select the area you want blended (you can select an area with the patch tool by drawing a shape, or select it with any other tool before switching to the patch tool), then click and drag until you’re hovering over the spot you want to blend with (usually, it’s right next to your original selection), then release and watch it blend!

Selective Color

Selective color is an adjustment layer you can use to change individual colors in your image. In the drop down menu, choose the color you want to adjust (my screenshot shows yellow), then adjust the colors within that color.

You can apply the selective color to the entire layer by just clicking “Selective Color.” This is an easy way to correct the color on any image you have chosen. You can also have the selective color apply to just a selection in a layer, by selecting the part you want to adjust, then clicking the “Selective Color” icon. Or you create the adjustment layer, then, with the “white” adjustment layer selected, use the black paintbrush to “erase” (I know, it seems backwards) parts of the adjustment layer you don’t want to use.

I thought my image was just a bit too yellow, so I used the Selective Color tool to adjust the entire layer. If you can’t find the adjustments layer panel, try changing your Photoshop mode to”Photography” on the top right.

Color design - Selective Color Tool

Levels

Adjusting the lighting levels can be done directly on the layer, but I suggest doing it as an adjustment layer (like the selective color we did above), so you can change it later if you need to. Levels allow you to change the lighting to make your image really pop with contrast. The slider on the left adjusts the darker lighting (slide it to the right to make the darks darker), the slider in the middle adjusts medium lighting (slide it to the left to make those levels lighter and the right to make the levels darker), and the slider on the right adjust the light lighting (slide it to the left to make the light levels even lighter).

Cover design - Levels Tool

Lighting Effects

For lighting effects, go to Filter –> Render –> Lighting Effects. If the option is grayed out, make sure you click on your image layer—you can’t apply lighting effects to an adjustment layer. Before using lighting effect, I suggest creating a copy of your image layer (the shortcut is ctrl + j) in case you later decide you don’t like the lighting effect.

I like to use the Spot lighting effect. Feel free to experiment with the size of the highlight and the hot spot, the intensity, the ambient light, and so on.

Cover design - Lighting Effects Spot

More Photoshop Tricks for Cover Design

You can find more Photoshop tricks like creating light streams, sparkles or magic dust, and even fire. Even the tricks shown above can be used to create more dramatic effects than what we did. Some of these are made manually, and some are made using Photoshop “actions.” We highly recommend the affordable Photoshop actions from Envato Market for those of you who are a little more advanced.

Have fun experimenting! And next time, we’ll look at choosing and placing fonts on your cover image.

Have cover tips to share? Please let us know in the comments below.

If you’d like to learn more about Book Cave promotions and receive more writing tips, please enter your email below and click the “Learn More” button to receive our author newsletter.

Copyright 2016 by Book Cave
Reuse notice: Non-commercial users, feel free to print out “Cover Design Part 2: Setting up Your File and Image” for personal use or give to friends, share online, or make a meme of, as long as you attribute and link back to this post. Commercial users, you may share a link to this post or quote a short excerpt from it with attribution and a link to this site, but you may not use this post in its entirety. Thank you for caring about copyright.

Avatar for Catia Shattuck
Catia Shattuck

I am a copyeditor and a typesetter of print books, and have been editing and typesetting (using InDesign) for thirteen years. As the executive editor at Book Cave, I enjoy helping authors be successful, and I only get interrupted a little bit (ha!) by my cute, rambunctious two-year-old.


Share this authorpost

Keep Reading

tips for authors: book marketing mindset

7 Tips for Authors on Having a Book Marketing Mindset

With the right mindset, marketing your books can be a lot less frustrating and even become fun. Here are 7 tips to having the right marketing mindset.

Add a Subscriber Magnet Book on Your Dashboard

How to Add a Subscriber Magnet Book on Your Dashboard

Subscriber magnets are a fabulous way to build your newsletter lists and ultimately sell more books. If you need help putting up your subscriber magnet, this tutorial will walk you through it step-by-step.

qualities of successful authors

5 Qualities of Successful Authors

What qualities make a successful author?

Hello fellow book lover! We hope you are enjoying this post.
If you want free, content-rated ebooks that you can download straight from your favorite retailer, just sign up for our free newsletter
Sign me up!

Leave a Reply

Cancel


Comments

    Receive free ebooks on Amazon Kindle from Book Cave
    Receive free ebooks on Apple Books from Book Cave
    Receive free ebooks on Google Play from Book Cave
    Receive free ebooks on Kobo from Book Cave
    Receive free ebooks on Nook from Book Cave
    Receive free ebooks on Smashwords from Book Cave
    Book Cave
    Book Cave Direct
    My Book Ratings
    MY BOOK RATINGS
    Connecting the RIGHT readers with the RIGHT books
    • Sitemap
    • Contact Us
    • Free ebooks
    © Book Cave - All the rights reserved!