A Photoshop Trick for Book Marketing

I have cast-of-character strips on my book web pages, bloodroomthenovel.com and thebaddeath.com. They give potential readers a chance to read bios of major characters. Also, the individual images give me visual aids to use in marketing my books. For instance, I'll post an individual character on Instagram with a provocative tagline and the web addy. Adobe offers a monthly subscription for Photoshop for less than $20/month, but you could probably find a good price on eBay or somewhere if you want to own it outright.

At left, you'll see the image I purchased at istockphoto.com has a dark background. Derek Murphy of Creativeindie Covers used this graphic to produce the cover for The Bad Death. At the time, I didn't have a large file of Derek's work. I used a jpeg of the cover in progress, pictured right. To change the model's brown eyes to my heroine's gold, I used Photoshop's marquee tool to select the gold eyes from Derek's small file and copied them into my large file, resizing them to fit my stock image.

Then I had to give my Anika the background Derek had. I have a graphic design background, but this trick is easy if you know where Photoshop's interface keeps the right tools.

Since I also bought the blue watery background from istockphoto, I had that large Photoshop image to work with. I opened that image in Photoshop and copied it into my working file. Copying into my working file automatically put the background on its own layer. On Anika's layer, I used Photoshop's pen tool to draw a path around her. See that thin light outline? That's the path.

When you click on the arrow in the Paths palette, a dropdown menu gives you the option to "Make Selection" of the path.

With the path selected, I clicked on Image in Photoshop's top menu. From the Image dropdown menu, I chose "Apply Image". At that point a palette popped up allowing me to select the layer containing the background.

TaDOW!