To be honest, I was just fiddling around with PSP for kicks. The final product (which I'll never bother to actually finish, touch-up, and etc) is far too small to be printed off and used, or to even be completed (as far as the small text and whatnot goes). I like the design, though...and I wish I knew a way to make the images I used large enough for an actual alternate cover to put in my collection.



Again, it's really basic in regard to the details (for example, the "credits" listed aren't complete. If I included all of it, the text would've been too small to read, and etc). Minor details aside, what do y'all think of the overall look of it? It took me less than 2 hours, all told.

-JP

How come you can't get it large enough? If you make your text 300 dpi it should be suitable for printing. Btw, you should do a search for the Steelfish and SF Movie Poster fonts. They're free and are great for doing professional-looking movie credits (plus they're both condensed fonts which should save you some space horizontally). For a slightly less condensed look Arial Narrow and Helvetica Medium Condensed are both good (although not free).

The images I found (for the front of the cover) are pretty much full size in the relatively small image I attached. For me to make this exact cover, with the same images, large enough to be printed off and used, would the images not seem extremely pixilated? I could get the text to work without a problem, it's just a matter of making the images I found large enough to be used. Understand what I'm getting at?

There may be an easy solution for the problem I have...but the templates are huge. I created this, just fooling around with PSP, on a blank canvas about 1/5 the size of the inches x inches template you recommended, because had I used the full-sized template, the images I wanted to use for the front of the cover (including the text used for the spine), without being "blown up," would have been about half the size of one of the images on the reverse side of the cover.

-JP

I see what you're getting at. Yeah, if the native resolution of the source images are too low or too small, then blowig them up would result in a noticeable loss of clarity.

Extensis makes a PSP plug-in called pxl SmartScale which is supposed to be able to scale images up to 1600% (yes, that was sixteen hundred) of their original size. I've used it to take a 7.5" wide design (at 300 dpi) up to 40" wide (and proportional length) for poster (text and images) to be used in a theater lobby and the result came out pretty well. But you do have to have a decent image to start with.

I've used some of those programs, and they do work to a degree, but it's not a perfect science by any means.

So, for super duper huge images that will actually fill those templates, where should a guy like me go? Because the templates were, without exaggeration, 5-6x bigger than the "canvas" I used.

-JP

I have a couple American History X covers saved that I could send you. You could recycle the poster art from them.

Yeah, if you could, please drop me a line. Thanks again.

-JP

I thought this thread was about you doing a custom cover for a UMD movie for the Sony PSP. I was thinking it would have to be a rip because AHX will probably never be released for it. So what does PSP stand for in this thread?

Paintshop Pro.

-JP

Covers sent.