Introduction
Everyone knows those very awesome album-covers. With a few fancy photo-manipulations and a few cool text-effects, you can make your own fancy album-cover.
It's really simple. All we need are 3 stock-photo's. One of a skyline or a landscape, one of a nice set of clouds or skyscape and one of a person you want on your cover. That could be an artist you're supporting, a model, a gamecharacter or it could even be you!

The Skyline
Choose a resonable size for your document. I chose 640px by 480px. Paste your desired skyline or landscape in your document. I used a nice skyline from sxc.hu and as you can see below, my skyline does not exactly fit the document-size.

I dragged the layer containing the skyline a little bit upwards to the center of the image. Then take out your Single Row Marquee-Tool and click on the top of the image. This tool will make you select one single row, which is 1px in height and 100% of your width. Once selected, press CTRL+T and while clicking on the middle anchor-point, drag the selection to the top of the image, stretching your image.
Press ENTER to accept this selection and press CTRL+D to deselect. This may cause some lines going up as you can see below, but that doesn't matter, since we're gonna fix that.

Do the same for the bottom of the image, but instead, before pressing ENTER, go to Edit>Transform>Perspective and drag either the left or the right anchor-point in the corner away from the center of the image making it look like the water is coming at you. Press ENTER and CTRL+D to deselect.

Grab your Retangular Marquee-Tool and drag a selection around the cityscape plus the shore, but NOT the water.
What you do know is press CTRL+C and CTRL+V and you'll notice you have gained a new layer with your city on it. Go to Edit>Transform>Flip Vertically and the image flips. Drag it so that the shore of your original layer and your flipped dupilcate touch each other. Then lower the opacity of the flipped duplicate.

The Artist
Now it's time to add your artist. Get the photo from the person you want to paste into this album and paste him/her in the document on a new layer.
You must use an image without a background. If your image still has a background, extract the person or thing from the background using a desired tool.

Press CTRL+T to get the person the right size for your final work. Then for the next step, I recommend lowering the opacity slightly on your person-layer. This way (especially on a cityscape), you can edit things quickly.

Use a desired tool (I used the Pen-tool) to cut away the bodyparts in front of the buildings... or the mountains or forest or anything if you're using an image that's not a cityscape. Then after that, reset the opacity back to 100%.

Use my Sunburst-Tutorial to add a sunburst behind your person. Place the sunburst-layer behind the person-layer and grab your 300px fuzzy Eraser and brush away all the stuff that is in front of the buildings.

Now use your clouds-image you got from scx.hu. Place it behind your sunburst and your person, but make sure it's above your skyline. Now grab the same brush as we used on the sunburst. Use this 300px fuzzy Eraser to erase parts where it overlaps the rest of the image.

Press CTRL+SHIFT+E to merge all the layers together and press CTRL+J to duplicate this layer. Now go to Filter>Blur>Gaussian Blur and set it to something around 10. Now set the blending-mode of this layer to OVERLAY.

Press CTRL+SHIFT+E again to merge both layers together, now go to Image>Adjustments>Gradient Map and add a gradient that goes from dark purple, to violet, to white. Make sure it looks the same as the image below.

Adding Text
Now, we're gonna add some text. This will be the title of the album. Not the artist. For this tutorial I started with white text in a Gothic-font. You can choose serif or sans-serif, but I wanted a little gangster-touch to it, so I made it look a little like the Saints Row-logo.
The text can be any color, since we're gonna add some layer-styles to it.

Now while holding CTRL, click on the thumbnail of the text to select it. Once selected, go to Edit>Modify>Expand and set it to 2-4px. Once you press OK, create a new layer underneath the text and fill it with black.

Give the white text these layer-styles:

And give the black text these layer-styles:


Now we are gonna add some fancy shapes behind the text. I used the cool grapevine-brushed from MissM. You can find her brushes at http://missm.paperlilies.com/ Create a layer behind the text and when applying the brushed, make sure you use white and set the blending-mode to OVERLAY.

And who could forget the logo of the publisher and the well-known "Parental Advisory"-sign. The logo is just mine and the Advisory-patch can be found at google. But because I'm so cool, I've uploaded it here!


For the name of the artist, I did the exact same thing as I did for the title of the album, except, this time, I merged the two text-layers together and pressed CTRL+T to make it smaller and placed it underneath the album-title.

Conclusion
And there you have it. Your album-cover is done!
And the possibilities are endless. If you used a different background or person, this will work as well. I'm very interested in what you made out of this, if you got a totally different version! Upload your cover to Imageshack or to your own server and paste the URL in the comments below!