Creating a spine / cover label for bookbinding

[carthurjohn]

Amateur bookbinder here trying to get to grips with Photoshop to produce spine and cover labels for my homemade books - a much cheaper way to go than trying to do it via gold tooling.

However, I can't seem to get my head round the tools in Photoshop and wonder if there are any book-related videos on using photoship for beginners or templates that I could adapt.

Thanks for any advice on this.

[D Fosse]

If those labels contain text and/or graphic elements, Photoshop is not a good tool for this. You would normally use InDesign or possibly Illustrator, depending.

Doing it in Photoshop is possible, but it's a kludge and the result not optimal. Photoshop is for images. The text and vector tools are mainly aids for selecting pixels, not intended for final output.

[carthurjohn]

Hi,

Thanks for the suggestion. Unfortunately neither InDesign or Illustrator are in my subscription. I only tend to use Lightroom for photos and get Photoshop thrown in but hardly ever use it, so I was trying to see if I could get some value out of it for my bookbinding.

[Chuck Uebele]

A book cover and spline shouldn't be too difficult. You mentioned Labels. Are you just taking about text and no image? 

[carthurjohn]

Yes just text with a border, a twiddly scroll or a line or two.