Doing a Book (In PhotoShop)

Well, My mom has a book she's published coming out soon, and it's being sold online as an e-book, maybe/maybe not in print later.

For those interested in the book itself, it's about 18th century naval battles, I think. I haven't read it yet, but I hope to soon. It sounds pretty good. It comes out April 17th. You can find more at my link "mom's books" to the left, or just click here.

She wanted me to do an illustration of a book for it, rather than just the flat image someone threw together for her as a cover.

This is it.

I honestly had a moment of frustration when I first saw it way back when. I could have done a better job than whoever she paid to, had I had a source photo of such a boat. I just didn't help her because I didn't know where to find one.


I could do better water, better clouds, better lighting... It's not that bad, though. Still... I feel kinda dumb. I need to get better at finding source pics.



Here is my book. Or her book. Or whatever.
This isn't one she's using, but it's my presentation of it. She preferred a plain white background.

What I did was use free transform to give perspective. I moved a duplicate right and down once, then duplicated that a couple times with ctrl+alt+shift+T on the same layer. That made a front cover, with thickness.
I duplicated all of that and moved it left and up to be the back cover.

Then I used the single-column marquee tool to select the edge of the front and transformed it to make the spine. I put a low-opacity fill over it to make the spine different and darker and less striped from the stretch.
I copied the text from the original with color select, and used it on the spine via transform.

The pages was the tricky part. I finally ended up deciding to just do a carefully crafted white shape. I cut triangles out along the back page corners. You can't see it in this scaled-down image.

Last, I played. I found a nice gradient, I did a reflection, and I added mild shadows and lighting. I think it's a job well done!