Making My Book Cover

As I mentioned, I am in the final stages of publishing a book on the use of handplanes in woodworking.  Titled Choosing and Using Handplanes, it describes handplanes of many types and helps the newer handplane user to set up, sharpen and use a handplane.  It will be for sale on Amazon.com in a paperback edition later in November and in a Kindle version soon after that.

Yesterday I built the cover for the book.  That in itself was an interesting photographic project.  I began by making the pile of shavings that form the background photo.  Because this is a close-up photo, I needed good depth of focus in the photo.  I used the photo stacking technique in which I took nine photos, each focused successively deeper into the field of view.  Then I stacked these photos using the Helicon Focus software.  This produced a single file that combined the best focus from the nine original shots.  I then took that photo into Photoshop and did a little light editing.  That photo became the background layer for my composite image.  To that I added the photo of the handplane on the walnut board, the titles and the box for the back cover.  I will flatten this image and save it as a high resolution pdf file for publication by Amazon's CreateSpace publishing-on-demand system.

This project took me several hours of experimentation and adjustments to the colors of the titles and the sizes of the various elements.  I went through at least a dozen different versions before I arrived at this nearly final copy.  I'm glad to have this part of the process behind me.  What remains is to finish the final text edit and then to produce the final copy for publication.  I may be able to finish it yet this week.