Old Pulp Covers -- Make Your Own!

If you haven't seen my previous post about the old N.C. Wyeth pulp cover, go take a quick look at it. In this post I'll briefly show how I took an old cover of my own -- the cover to Jazz Age Chronicles #1, which came out back in 1990 -- making it rather vintage in its own right.

What I wanted to do was make the cover look like it's 100 years old. I wanted it to look like a beat-up old book cover, so to do that I found a beat-up old book cover. (Specifically, it's an old book of Jennifer's about the Beatles. She wanted to make sure I included that.) It has a blank cover, which is essential here, so the only features on the cover are the wear and the tear:

Now, ideally an old pulp magazine cover would be best -- the wrinkles and tears in an old magazine cover are different from the ones in this hardback book -- but I couldn't find such an item, and pulp magazines with blank covers are a little hard to scare up. So this cover would have to do. And it did.

I sized the cover to fit the original cover perfectly. Then I started with the Photoshop hokus-pokus! My first step was put white in the foreground color palette and go to Select>Color Range, and make a selection of the white tears and peels in the surface of the cover. I played with the value until I was getting most of the white and none of the blue. Then I made a new layer and using Option-Delete, I filled in the selection with the white, making a nice opaque white layer of the tears and scraps over the cover art.

Then, going back to the layer with the book cover, I went to Image>Adjustments>Hue/Saturation (or Apple-U -- get it? U? Hugh? Oh, that one cracks me up every time!) and played with the hugh, and the saturation, and the lightness, until the blue of the cover became a nice yellow-ochre of old, faded pulp paper:

This example shows the cover before I went into Image>Adjustments>Curves and played with the contrast until the outside edges were dark again. I don't have a picture of that, but you're visual people -- I'm sure you can see it in your mind.

Then I set that layer on Multiply, so the original cover art shows through underneath. I added a new layer over all of these others and filled it with more yellow-ochre color, and set it to multiply also. Then I just played with the opacity of all these layers, until I got the final look I wanted:

Ta-daah! Not bad, huh? Now, there are other effects I could have used on this, and have in previous work, such as adjusting the color saturation of the artwork, adding some noise texture to the top layer, "tearing" one of the corners by using the lasso to select it and turning it slightly, or even pushing one of the color layers -- cyan or magenta works best -- just a tad, to make it look like slightly out-of-register old-style printing. I never do the exact same effects every time, and that's the fun part -- improvising and finding different ways to make different effects. But these are some basic steps, one basic approach, and if nothing else, they should help you find your own way to go about it.

Stumble It!