Moon Reached, Now On To Mars

My best of 2007 music mix is entitled Moon Reached, Now On To Mars (album cover pictured below).

The album cover was created in Adobe Photoshop 6.0 and is essentially a composition of three separate photographs I took plus an image I found on flickr (here). I spent more time on the idea than on the implementation, thus the baby and polar bear definitely "stick out" more than I'd like. In other words, they don't fit seamlessly into the picture. This is mainly because of lighting and edge blur issues.

The background is a picture of the North Cascades that Danyel Fisher and I took while on a hike of Mount Dickerman in late September 2006.


The first thing I did to the original image was to transform it from a 4:3 aspect ratio to a 1:1 aspect ratio. I did this by rescaling the blue sky. Increasing the sky's size also had the result of changing the viewer's perspective slightly by moving the horizon line to roughly the middle of the photo. Thus, it appears (to me anyway) to give the image more visual depth.


The second thing I did to the background was add an additional translucency layer with a blue hue and a "Linear Burn" effect. This was to create a dusk-like effect in the image as I wanted it to appear later in the day.


The polar bear shot was taken at the Como Zoo in Minnesota in October 2006. We were there celebrating my niece's first birthday (see this link). I didn't want to spend much time on this project, so I quickly used a combination of the "Magic Wand Tool" set to a variety of tolerances and the Eraser to cut out the polar bear from its surroundings. I resized the bear, darkened it slightly, and applied a little motion blur after adding it as a layer on top of the background.

The pink baby riding the polar bear is actually my niece. This photo was taken the same day as the polar bear photo at the Como Zoo. Once again, I used the Magic Wand Tool and the Eraser to cut the desired object from the image. I rotated the baby, increased the blue and green hue, and applied a motion blur after adding it as a layer on top of the polar bear. Both the polar bear and the baby are on top of the blue "dusk" layer.


Finally, the moon was extracted from its original image, resized, and placed behind the blue "dusk" layer. Then text was added to complete the album cover.

And, finally, the finished product:

The back of the album was generated, in part, by iTunes. I simply overlaid the track names and my favorite albums releases on top.