Alovely little collection for Krishna Levy’s 2006 score for Tarsem Singh’s epic The Fall. Sadly, the score was never released, only a handful of tracks can be found on a composer’s compilation from 2013, which doesn’t do the score, and more importantly the movie, any justice.

I had collected some high-resolution source images and wanted to design a correspondingly high-quality cover artwork that I could use for my own digital music collection, particularly for the Ludwig van Beethoven composition Symphony No.7 in A major op.92 – II, Allegretto. A timeless masterpiece in its own right, which has been given appropriate use in the iconic opening credits of this film (and many other films as well).

#1: The Fall (Custom)

#2: The Fall (Custom)

#3: The Fall (Custom)

#4: The Fall (Custom)

This set consists of three different custom covers, on which I tried out three different types of image manipulation this time.

• Cover #1, which is based on the main movie poster, was put together from two differently oriented posters (portrait and landscape). I filled in the remaining gaps using Photoshop’s context-based filling.
• Cover #2 sports the old-fashioned way, which means that I restricted myself to manual retouching. Photoshop offers various tools for this (e.g. the stamp-tool….) that allow you to copy or clone certain areas of the image onto other areas and thus gradually expand and alter the image.
• Cover #3 was realized using Photoshop’s new AI-powered generative fill tool. This way I could easily transform the original portrait image into a square format. Photoshop simply “made-up” the missing image information on the left and right – which is somehow both magical and scary at the same time.

I have to say that the old-fashioned methods (#2) still work best if you take your time and if the source material is in high resolution. No matter how impressive these AI tools may work, you can still tell that something’s not quite right (just take a closer look at the mountain range in cover #3). Back in spring 2024 when I created the cover, Photoshop still generated very blurry AI images. Though since then, Adobe has significantly improved its algorithm, making the differences even more difficult to spot. But it also takes much longer to compute. Anyways…

The mockup you see above is something I’ve made entirely from scratch, without a pre-existing template and certainly without any artificial intelligence whatsoever. To do this, I first created each individual surface of the vinyl cover as a flat, two-dimensional texture, then converted these into Smart Objects and then distorted them to bring them into the correct perspective. To make the mockup look as realistic as possible, I’ve added lots of superimposed colour gradients, lighting/shadows and bevel/emboss effects.

It was super helpful that my original work document was 6000×3000 pixels, so I was able to hide some of my wrongdoings when I downsized the final image. It’s not perfect, but if you don’t look too closely, it works quite well and I’m actually kinda proud of it.

A key aspect of the final design was choosing the right font. I wanted it to bring its own character to the design, but at the same time work as a die cut cover to reveal enough of the inner sleeve underneath. After trying a few different options, I went for a stencil font called Joschmi. Finally, I added a small cut-out on the right edge, which not only makes it easier to pull out the inner sleeve, but also helps align the die cut design horizontally.