Teen Magazine Cover Tutorial

Now find another image which you want to bring in, something that focuses on a person for this people teenie mag. Make a selection with your marquee tool to close in on the area you want, switch to the moVe tool and drag within that selection to bring it over into the .psd file.

Now you can go ahead and scale it down some more (you know how).

Get it so that it is close enough to fit within and on top of the pink area.

Now grab your ?m? marquee tool and create a selection so that all areas of the new layer have some space around them.
You might have to drag another guideline down this time from the top so you can leave a little extra space at the bottom. This helps get a selection where you want it to.

Once you have the selection where you want it to, just click on the layer mask icon. 

You can see it in the layer mask icon in the palette.

and it will automatically hide any other pixels outside of the selection.

Since this is a magazine, we want to have a nice balance of vector (shapes mostly as text backdrops), images, and appropriate typography.  Add some more supplementary text that is small in size to put next to your new images on the bottom.

 Here I?m grabbing another image to put on top of the blue backdrop by first making a selection to crop the area that i want and moving it in.

Hmm...this looks good enough to make the cover shot itself..

For now though I?m scaling it down and then using the same technique to create a selection around the area that I want to keep and then clicking on the layer mask icon to hide the rest of the pixels.

Create some more supplementary text and choose one of the colors we?re already using or keep it white. Having these different solid color backgrounds help the text to stand out more by itself b/c we?re not going for beauty here (that?s for the cover shots), but the publisher wants to get these magazines off of the shelves (always keep this in mind when designing in this genre).

Go ahead and apply a rotation under Edit: Transform menu on one of the text layers. This creates more visual variety. Always think of little things like this to spice it up b/c often you?ll be working off of the same template.

Now grab your circular marquee tool.

Hold down shift while click dragging to get a perfect circle. Now right click and choose Make Work Path.