Album Art - Teddy Swims | Lyrics Poster

Challenging myself to expand my photoshop abilities, I started with the photo below, downloaded from Unsplash (credit to John Cameron.)

From here, I used content aware fill and a hue layer to adjust my background to be blank and traffic-cone orange, the color of my artist of choice's album background. (Teddy Swims, I've Tried Everything but Therapy; check it out.)

Next came finding some nice images of him and I chose this one, then created a layer mask and adjusted levels to cut out his hair and water ripples as closely as I could before exporting and popping it into my project.

I used 2 layers of this photo to create additional blending effects to mimic printing errors with ink straying (love extra grunge), one a standard multiply blend, and the other a lighten blend with a motion blur and pink gradient map.

Finally, I added in his name, album title and track name/number, as well as the standout lyric from the chorus, how the song got its name.

I used both Carefree, a serif by Jen Wagner Co., and Helvetica Neue.

From there, I finished applying "print" edits to the text via gaussian and motion blur filters as well as distortion blending with tilt-shift blur on the title.