And while it’s not as fancy, it still does the job. And it was ridiculously easy to do with Paint Shop Pro. Here’s how you can do it yourself.

Step 1: Create the Front

The first thing to work on is the main cover graphic, the front of your cover or box. Start by creating a large picture, at least 400 pixels wide. You’ll be shrinking it down at some point to create smaller versions of your cover/box. Starting with a large picture and shrinking it always works better than starting with a small picture and expanding it.

Creating the front graphic is perhaps the hardest part of the whole process. This is where you need to be creative. The only advice I can give you here is to use large fonts for the product title so that they’re very readable when you shrink the cover or box. And to turn on anti-aliasing for smooth curves.

Let’s create a cover for my special report The Real AdSense Code: Understanding the AdSense Patent, which I was too lazy to market properly. We start with a blank 400 by 600 image and color it deep green:

(Note that most of the screenshots are not being shown actual size.)

Now we place images and text on the cover:

To create this image I just placed some text on the background and stuck on a public domain image from PDPhoto.org. The best advice is to keep things simple unless you’re a good artist.

Now we’re ready for the next step.

Step 2: Create the Sides

A 3D book/box has at least one side visible in addition to the front. Typically this is the left side. You may also want to include a top side in the shot, however I would recommend you stick to one side initially until you get the hang of things.

Start by creating a new image that is the same height as the front image, but a much smaller width. How wide depends on how “thick” you want the final image to be. Typically, e-book boxes are thinner than software boxes, but it’s up to you to figure out what’s right.

Now fill in the side image. First, rotate the side image counter-clockwise 90 degrees so that it’s wide and short. This makes it a lot easier to work with the text. You can rotate it after you’re done.

The side should be based on and complementary to the front. Same colors, repeat the text if possible.

Here’s the side for my special report:

Now we play with the perspective.

Step 3: Change the Perspective

A 3D look is all about perspective, making one side look smaller than the other. Luckily, Paint Shop Pro has a tool that makes changing the perspective very easy.

Make a copy of the front cover image (you should always keep copies of the individual parts of your cover/box so that you can fix or update them later). On the copy, select Perspective – Horizontal from the Geometric Effects submenu under Effects:

On the resulting dialog, set the Distortion value to somewhere between 10 and 25, depending on what angle you want for the book. Set the Edge mode to the appropriate color, which is usually white:

Here’s the resulting image for a distortion of 15:

Repeat the procedure for the side, except use the negative value for the distortion. Here’s the side distorted to -15:

Now place the two distorted images side by side on your screen. Does it look good together? If not, you can adjust things by hand using the Deform tool if necessary.

Step 4: Combine the Images

Once you’re satisfied, it’s time to combine the images together. Start by creating a new blank image that is larger than the front and side images combined. Make the background color white. Now copy the front and side images onto this new image and place them close together. You may or may not want to leave a line of pixels between the two. Play with it and see what looks best. You can also use various other tools to shade the edges differently, or blend them together somehow.

Here are the images combined to form a box:

(Remember, it looks better if you click on it and see it full-sized.)

At this point you can do other things like add drop shadows and such, but the basic box is good enough for most needs.

Resize the box into different sizes (always remembering to start from largest size for each resize operation) and you’re done!

Here’s the final image scaled down to 250 pixels wide:

See how much sharper it looks? This was done using Paint Shop Pro’s “smart size” resizing.

If you’re using another software package, the steps would be much the same — all you need is a perspective mode of some kind.

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