Roy Woods Album Cover Design in Photoshop

In this tutorial I’ll show you how to make an Album Cover Design in Photoshop in a few simple steps. We are going to replicate the style of Roy Woods. The design is simple and easy to achieve, but sometimes the simplest things can be the most complicated. 

Let’s Break down this tutorial before we begin

1. Setting up the Photoshop Document

2. Creating the Circle Glow

3. Adding the Model

4. Adding the Noise

5. Adding the Text 

This is the finished design we will achieve through this tutorial.

Let’s dive right in.

Step 1. Setting up the Photoshop Document

For the Size I have used 2000x2000px  with a Resolution of 150DPI and since I’m not going to be printing the artwork, I’ll select RGB Color Mode. 
Who prints CD Covers these days? 

Once I’ve done that, I’ll change the color of my background to BLACK. Just press Ctrl or CMD I to invert the default color of white to black.

You could also add a solid color adjustment layer and use black as the color. 

Step 2. Creating the Circle Glow

Right Click on the layer and select “Convert to Smart Object” 

Converting it to a Smart Object will ensure that we can work in a non destructive manner, any filters we apply to our “circle” can be changed later as opposed to a Rasterized layer. 

Do the same for the ORANGE circle but this time change the Gaussian Blur to 16.0

This is how your Circles should be looking. Nice and Blurry! 

Lastly!

Create a New Layer and press B on the keyboard to bring up the Brush Tool and select the default SOFT ROUND BRUSH 

Right click on the canvas to bring up the brush settings (this is the easiest and shortest way) and bring the hardness all the way to 0 and make the brush size 700px which is almost the same size of the circles.

On the tool bar, make sure your foreground color is set to #e7593d

Nice! We’re done creating the glows. On to Step 3. 

Step 3. Bringing in the Model

Download the Model Image from Here

Once we’ve opened up our model image in photoshop we need to mask him out before we add him in to our Album Cover document.

If you are using Photoshop CC 2018 and above you can cut the model out easily by going to the Select menu and click on Subject. Photoshop will automatically select out the model for you. 

After photoshop is done selecting the model, you may need to use the quick selection to select the spectacles of the model. 

Press W on the keyboard to bring up the Quick Selection tool and select his spectacles. 

After you’ve got a good selection, press CTRL or CMD J to add the cutout of the model to a new layer. 

You can now drag the model layer to the Album Design PSD (the one with the circles) and place the model in the center. 

You can also press CTRL or CMD A to copy the model and head on over to the Album PSD and press CTRL or CMD V to paste the model on to a new layer. 

Obviously you will now need to resize the model so he fits nicely in the design. 

We need to color grade the model in so it looks like he belongs in the scene. We’ll do so by adding a few adjustment layers to the model. 

We will start by adding a BLACK AND WHITE ADJUSTMENT LAYER and clip it to the model by right clicking on the adjustment layer and selecting “create clipping mask”. Now the Black and White adjustment layer will only effect the model and not the other layers. 

Next we will add a GRADIENT MAP ADJUSTMENT LAYER which will add the colors of the glows to the model. I’ve used #ff5d15 for the orange. That’s all I’ve done!

You can already see that the model blends in much better. It looks like he belongs in the scene. You can add a curves or levels adjustment layer and brighten him up a bit but we won’t need to do that here. He looks fine! 

Step 4. Adding Noise

Let’s add some grain and noise to the album artwork design to give it some texture. 

Create a new layer, press SHIFT + F5 or go to EDIT – FILL  and from the Contents dropdown, select 50% GRAY. 
Click OK

Now go to FILTER – NOISE – ADD NOISE (20%)

Change the blending mode of the noise layer to OVERLAY and bring down the OPACITY to 25%

Not bad at all, just add the text & we’re done! 

Step 4. Adding TEXT

TITLE FONT (CLUB NITRO HOUSE) –  I’ve used steelfish bold for the title with a size of 182 pt.

SUB TEXT (VERTICAL TEXT) – For the Sub Text, I’ve used the Montserrat Bold from dafont.com with a size of 9.46 PT and a TRACKING of 250 and I’ve lowered the opacity of the text to 45% so it doesn’t stand out too much.

You can download the fonts here:

Montserrat Bold
Steelfish Bold

To finish things off I added a Parental Advisory from google images and threw it in the design. With some bold text I added the Artist Series and Billboard Logo to add a little polish to the overall design. 

There you have it, we have completed this Album Cover Design in Photoshop. I’m pretty happy with the results. I’m giving you the completed PSD so you can follow along with this tutorial. 

Remember, Art is Subjective, you don’t have to follow the exact settings and colors I’ve used, experiment and have fun. 

Download the PSD