SPECIAL NOTE:
This design was awarded 3rd Place in the Special Section Covers category in the annual Arkansas Press Association contest.

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Spotlight on Crawford County is a new annual magazine publication. It features tourist attractions, local history stories, and other things.

This cover features a photograph of a local attraction, Natural Dam (click for Google photo results that a local photographer took.

Unfortunately, the photo was at 96 dpi and not the required 300 dpi for magazine quality. I spent almost 2 weeks working this photo to get the quality where it needed to be. I included lots of small amounts of motion blurs, smart blurs, and manual clean-up to bring it up to spec.

Once the photograph was finished, I started on the lettering. Soft blue lettering was not the best choice for contrast, but that was not my aim. The "O" was the contrast point in this piece. I was trying to make the contrast point bright, but not realistic. I wanted it to still represent the O-shape. The light that is omitting I wanted to look like actual light from a spotlight.

In the end, I darkened the photograph slightly to hide the minor blemishes that were showing due to the low quality of the photo and also to make the headline shadow blend slightly better. Not the best approach but I achieved all of the goals I was reaching for with this cover.

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