Shoutbox

3


For future reference, the image of the Covenant cruiser was not taken from anything on the internet or in a magazine. Its the bottom of the Truth and Reconciliation, captured with Fraps over about 2 hours for every little detail. I've got the image on my hard drive to prove it.

This one is markedly different from the other two, because it does away with the black spine, using one large image to cover both the front and back cover. Keep in mind that the cruiser on the back is much much larger in the original image, but scaled back here to fit on the back cover.

I've also included a shot of a warthog (its a bit distorted tho). The strange thing about the back cover is that it has 2 feature shots, the large one of the chief on the left and the hog on the right

I had a few friends ask me how I got the shadow underneath the warthog. I duplicated the layer with the hog on it in photoshop, free transformed/distorted/skewed the image so it looked a little bit more realistic, and then applied a gaussian blur to it.

On a final note - I had a really hard time getting all my text readable on the cover. 750 x 500 pixels is not much room to get a lot of readable text in. The workaround I used involved using Illustrator and Photoshop. I typed up the text in Illustrator, imported it into photoshop at a much larger size, then shrank it down using the "bicbuic smoother/sharper" commands under resize image. It made all the difference. I used the same trick with the ratings, bungie and microsoft logos. I downloaded all of the logos in EPS format off the internet (they are free for public use). The bungie logo was ripped from the Halo PDF manual (its on the front cover). The logos are much sharper than the gif and jpeg ones you can download off a website, plus they have transparent background so no more stuffing around with jagged pixelly edges.