Use Photoshop

There's still plenty of room for Photoshop in a modern fashion photographer's workflow. Although much of the stuff that Photoshop used to do has been taken over by tools such as Aperture and Lightroom, nothing beats Photoshop for down-and-dirty retouching work.

Here we've exported our photograph from Lightroom into Photoshop and cleaned up the image by removing small artefacts. We've then sharpened the image and boosted the contrast.

The next thing to do is add the other elements of the front cover to the graphic. We've used the text tool to create the magazine title and the words that describe the main features in this month's issue.

Conventionally, you'll supply a Photoshop file in CMYK colour to the magazine you're working for and they'll import this into whatever they use to layout the pages (usually InDesign or QuarkXPress). You won't add the magazine logo or text yourself. In our example, however, we'll add the titles ourselves and print the file straight from Photoshop.