The Dame Wore White by Justin R Macumber
“Running a jazz club is hard, even with robot bartenders, but when a mysterious woman in white enters the Black Magic Lounge, Sal Mackelroy’s life gets even harder. At first it’s quick words and quicker dancing, but soon enough he finds himself chased by thugs with itchy trigger fingers. Just who is this dame in white, and why are people willing to kill to get her back? Nothing is what it seems in this neo-noir tale of action, mystery, and romance.” (via the description on Amazon.com)
Pulling inspiration from the pulp noir novels of yesteryear, I had a lot of fun pulling this one together. It took awhile to find the right photography for this one, but the extra time really paid off in the end.
After assembling the image the way I wanted it, I applied a number of filters to achieve this look, including Oil Painting and different brushstrokes, alternating each pass with Gaussian Blur to give it a less digitized look. The effect came out better on the woman than the man behind her, but I have no idea why. I duplicated the individual layers and merged the copies together for the filtering process. I think this might be due to there being less variation in the colors and shading of the man, but I’m not gonna pretend like I understand. They’d call it Perfectshop instead of Photoshop if everything did exactly what you wanted it to. LOL
Regardless, I think this cover turned out really nicely. I’m happy with the approximation of the style and, more importantly, so is Mr. Macumber.
Thoughts. I wants them, Precious.