Does anyone know how Eightcell does that nifty gradient effect on the front cover template? It's not in the original PNG template, and I'm not all that good at photoshop so I don't know how to do it. Can anyone give me some tips?
Yes! I use modded versions of the cover templates on both the GBA and Dreamcast covers I do. They both have this drop shadow sort of effect under the left hand graphic. I could post them at some point i guess. There are a bunch of ways to do it, but this might be the easiest to explain (though you'll need to know a bit about photoshop terminology to "get it" i think):
In Photoshop select the magic wand tool, then make sure "contiguous" is unchecked and "all layers" is unchecked. Now click the negative space around the graphic, you should now have all the space on the right and left of the graphic selected.
Go Select>Invert at the top. Now create a new layer BELOW the current layer. Fill the selection with black using the paint bucket. Now get rid of the selection.
With this new layer selected go Filter>Blur>Gaussian Blur and slide the bar till you start seeing gradient spill out from behind the graphic. When you're happy with it hit OK.
Now delete any of the black that spilled out onto the spine. You can adjust the layers opacity to make it lighter or you can duplicate the layer to make it darker.
