On the Cover of Rolling Stone: Magazine Cover in Photoshop

Be on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine? Sure. Cool. But I don't want to take the time to try and get famous enough to do it ... so I'm going to cheat. With a copy of Photoshop (any version from 7.0 through the current CS3 will work) or your favorite graphics editor with layer editing capabilities (like GIMP), you can cheat too.

Rolling Stone Magazine Cover: The Steps

Designing a magazine cover professionally is one thing ... what we're going to do is copy something that's already been done, though, so that we don't have to spend years learning all the concepts. If we're cheating our way onto a cover of Rolling Stone, we might as well continue the trend of taking the easy way out, right? Right. Let's get going.

1. Rolling Stone Font - First, you'll want to install a copy of the Rolling Stones font. It's free, and you can grab it here.

2. New Canvas - We're going to assume that you'd like to print your final creation. Hey, you could even frame it. Make a great gift for someone with a sense of humor, wouldn't it? So, open a new canvas (File, New) that is 8.5 x 11 inches, 300 pixels/inch resolution, in RGB mode with a white background. Yes, it's huge. But this way it will print so beautifully you'll be proud of it, and not have to explain away pixellation.

3. Place an Image - Obviously, you're going to need to start out with an extremely high-resolution photo. If you don't have one that would be just right, you can take some time to think about a theme for your cover and take a new photo that would work into that theme. You don't have to by any means - just make sure that you're not having to enlarge the photo you start out with.

In the hopes of not freaking people out with a photo of myself, I'm going to continue my lazy way through this cover and use a photo of a celebrity.

Once you have your image placed on the canvas, you'll want to consider whether or not any background should remain. Take a quick look at a few pictures of Rolling Stone covers and you'll notice that most of them don't keep a background, and those that do have a really particularly stunning one. It's all up to you. If you choose to remove the background, take your time getting the lines neat and crisp.