Abstinent Obsession Album Cover

In my teacher’s words:

Project Aims:

You have been commissioned to produce a series of images to be used as album cover art for a fictional band called ‘Abstinent Obsession’. Abstinent Obsession have an experimental approach with each album being very different from the last – So you are able to represent the musical genre of your choice in the artwork! Think about the band’s name and how you might represent there identify within the artwork in relation to your chosen genre of music. Be as creative, wild, restrained, political or conceptual as you like…but be as innovative as possible!

Task: Begin researching the use of photography in album cover artwork. Look at how visual language and narrative are used to illustrate a concept. In the studio and/or on location – Produce a series of images presented in complete layouts:

3 Square images:

Front cover

Back cover (remember to include the spin details)

Inlay booklet back cover

1 Landscape format image:

Inlay booklet interior (double page image – Factor the central fold in your composition)

And so I started my research. Here’s some of what I found via Internet. I tried to find classical old covers that propably never wore out (like Beatles: Abbey Road, Led Zeppelin: 1 etc.), but I also wanted to make room for some new, exciting covers like My Chemical Romance’s ‘Three Cheers For Sweet Revenge’ DVD.

After doing a lot of researching, I started thinking of what kind of a band could Abstinent Obsession be. Suddenly I remembered my good friend Jarno, who wears these goth clothes all the time. And the best thing was that Jarno had just recently bought himself a new, very expensive btw, leather covered recliner with a hint of a goth style, of course. This dark, goth metal image could work, couldn’t it? What if there was only this dark, Brandon Lee look-a-like lead character on the cover of the album and everything in his band is based on some kind of an obsession. Generally, it is known that goth rock/metal -people have this reputation of an alcoholic, although some of them aren’t drinking at all. So, I turned this whole “what’s known to be true” thing upside down and made this guy an obsession for being sober, in other words water. He’s dinking fresh water from the bottle on the cover shot and the songs names are also about H20. Abstinent Obsession, long for water, forever . Here are the finished versions. From the left: booklet, booklet’s inside, inlay card, back cover.

Here are the originals for you to compare:

Here are some values which were the same in all 4 shots: Exposure 1/400 at f/3.5, ISO 200, focal length 18mm, metering mode: spot.
Here you can see the lighting setup:

What I did in Photoshop? Well, first I changed the temperature and tint values, so that the picture would look more cooler. Then I added more shadows and contrast. After doing these I used the extract and the gradient tool to make the front and the back cover look as they look now. I extracted the background and made a new one with gradient tool. Then I used the clone tool and the healing brush tool to erase the bottle’s name. In the inlay card I extracted the whole background and painted a new, black background for the coutch. That’s basically everything I did. Hope you enjoy!