Process of creating my magazine cover

The first thing I did when creating my magazine cover was create a black background using the rectangle tool. I then labelled that layer 'background' and locked it. I imported the same picture from my poster into here and scaled it to the size and position I wanted it.

I used two text boxes to create my masthead. I rasterised the text box layers so it was easier to scale and position the masthead. Also by doing this, I could merge the two layers together to move them both around easier. 

One convention of magazine covers are barcodes, as they are very important to keep track of various things such as how many issues are sold etc. I copied and pasted this barcode from google images and then scaled it to this size using the free transform tool. I then used the rectangle tool to create a white box behind the barcode so the date and price are visible. This makes it look more professional and like a real cover.

Plugs are conventions of film magazines, and so I made one by using the ellipse tool and text boxes. To make the red outline circle, I used the ellipse tool to make a solid circle, as labelled 'Ellipse 1' on the layers tab. To give the illusion of it being just a ring, I created another solid circle, however it is black and slightly smaller. I then used text boxes and different sized fonts to write the text out. Finally, I selected all 5 layers, rasterised them, then merged them together so I can move them around easier.