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Questions from the field... Sergey Mikhaylik wants to Give Books a look of depth Working in a publishing house I often have a need to advertise a new book. Of coarse I show the cover of it or simulate a picture of a book. Actually I have only flat picture of a cover. How can I easy way to add dimension to this picture to make it look like a real book? Thank you for your seminars. Lots of help! Formula for giving depth to boxes... I know that Sergey wants to apply the following to "book" art, however you realize that a book is really just a thin "box" -- right. The following is the way you make a Trimetric projection. (Can you say "Trimetric"... I knew you could!) I use the master file as an EPS template in Photoshop for quickly pushing and pulling art into a specific shape. By now you've created your covers as a FLAT piece of art... meaning you'll have the spine art ready to go. Follow these simple instructions: Set the spine and the cover next to each other, and create a "Top" to your book "Box" (just lines which represent pages.) which lines up with the spine.

Scale the TOP 70.7% (vert) Shear the TOP 45 degrees (hor) Rotate the TOP -15 degrees Scale the Front 96.6% (vert) Shear the Front -15 degrees (hor) Rotate the Front -15 degrees Scale the Spine 86.6% (vert) Shear the Spine 30 degrees (hor) Rotate the Spine 30 degrees If you don't want to make it that perfect, then method 2:

Cover: squeeze in and shear up Spine: Squeeze in and shear up Top: Connect the points with a 4th rear corner See diagram. If you have Photoshop and any of the 3D rendering plug-ins (which you should buy if you do much of this) like Andromeda 3-D (Here's a screen from Andromeda) then you just render your book wrapped to the surface of a book-shaped solid rectangle. These techniques can be done with any degree of slant/shear, from natural Trimetric to very slight hints of the spine. Fred From LETTERS@ from Readers Column

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