Sally Kilpin wins
This is the second “Winner on the night” competition for the club this year, a trophy will be presented at the end of the season. A varied selection of 57 pictures were entered in the Front Cover competition, and demonstrated a wide range of styles for the judge, Don Byatt, to comment on within the concept of a magazine front cover.
After the first pass of judging five entries were held back for another review, the top two were awarded the full 20 points and the other three awarded 19 points. The judge then gave first, second and third paces to the top images. Special congratulations to Sally Kilpin as she had two of her three pictures in the top three.
The control of lighting on the black dog against a black background plus the pose and expression of the dog made it the standout image of the evening for the judge. Gary Smith’s image of Lauren, taken during one of the studio workshop sessions, was judged to be a great cover image that fitted well within the confines of the magazine format. The third placed image from Sally Kilpin with the fish in it’s mouth was a stunning picture and fitted the required magazine composition ideally.
- Sally Kilpin 20pts (First)
- Gary Smith 20pts (Second)
- Sally Kilpin 19pts (Third)
- Brian Worley 19pts
- Jane Ambler 19ts
Winners gallery
- Sally Kilpin – Puppy Love (1st)
- Gary Smith – One Light Lauren (2nd)
- Sally Kilpin – Gotchya (3rd)
- Brian Worley – Wild wolf
- Jane Ambler – Antelope Canyon
Click on the thumbnail pictures to view them larger.
More magazine covers?
Some further interest exists in running this type of competition in the future and it has even been suggested that we find an editor of a magazine to judge the entries on the night. So if anyone has connections at a local or national magazine who might be able to get us a magazine editor to judge the competition in the future please get in touch. Also it might be time to get a new cover design for the magazine overlay too, so again if there are creative designers keen to design the front cover of a magazine then please contact us or leave a message in the comments.
Using Photoshop to automate the cover processing
It was all done in less than two minutes for all 57 images using a Photoshop action.
The action has the following steps:-
- Scale the image to exactly 742 pixels wide by 1050 pixels tall with the Image size command set to not maintain the aspect ratio. (Some images supplied were not exactly 742 x 1050 pixels so this fixes that)
- Convert the images to sRGB colour space. Since some images were supplied in AdobeRGB colour space this step corrects that and makes no difference if the image was already sRGB
- The overlay image was opened and the whole of it copied, then pasted over the original image
- The overlay image is closed
- The photo with the overlay is flattened to combine the image and the overlay layers
- Finally the new image with the overlay is closed saving the changes