Photoshop of Panel 1

This is the picture I decided to use, I liked this background more than the grass, stone or concrete as it gave a feeling of death and destruction better with the dead grass and dirt. I wanted the tags completely in the picture because it gives the appearance of loneliness and having been left behind, which does sometimes happen in war if a body cannot be recovered. The connotations of the tags being left behind reinforce my anti-war ideology and the dead grass and soil are very representative of a battleground where the land has yet to recover.  

First I changed the colour so the soil looked darker which made the tags stand out as they are shiny and brightly coloured in comparison. 

Next I changed the hue and saturation of the image to draw out some of the colour and give the grass a dead look, it also darkened the soil more but made it look slightly greyer at the same time, making the tags stand out more.  Although the tags are slighted darkened as well they still stand out as the brightest object in the image. In my final design the tags should look well used and aged rather than new to suggest to the audience that the soldier who they belonged to was mature and well versed in war, implying that no soldier is immune to death, even if they have survived a long period of time in it.  

I started blurring the edges of the image to suggest memory (the lack of colour also reinforces this idea). I layered the image, adding different amounts of blur on each layer so it increases as it moves towards the edge, but without blurring the central image. 

This is the complete blur effect; it is not too drastic but just enough to be noticeable. It also draws the audience’s attention to the centre of the image, to the dog tags. 

I isolated the tags to age them by darkened the edges and accenting the lines on the metal, I then slightly blurred the tags so the dark edges looked more aged. The aged tags are more emotive than the shiny new tags that the image showed before.  

I merged the aged tags onto the image. 

I added the album name ‘Dead Eyes’ to the tags. I added each word separately so I could manipulate each word so it was in line on the tags as the angle was different for each of them. I used grey text so I could give the look that the tags had been engraved. 

I edited the words and used ‘Bevel and Emboss’ and ‘Contour’ to make the words look like they had been engraved. 

I used my logo font in a separate Photoshop window and edited out the white around the lettering so just the black would show up. 

I pasted the logo text onto the image and chose the bottom right corner to place the logo as it had space to fit the logo neatly. I originally had a DPM camouflage pattern instead of black lettering; however when I pasted it onto the image the logo was unreadable so I decided to use a bold colour so it can be seen and read.