3D Book Cover Mockup and Print Resolution

Writing.

I've posted about this before, but wanted to show what can be done with some post processing.

You'll find the online tool here: https://diybookcovers.com/3Dmockups/

Sometimes, however, you want to stand out, or fix possible issues.

Examples

It's very easy to use, and the default results are quite nice, but you can improve them a little by using Krita, PhotoImpact, Photoshop, Gimp, whatever serves your needs. Here are some original and edited versions of 3D book mockups.

Composite standard, using different images with a spine

One of the things I noticed is that some covers work better than others when doing composites. The 'anime' styled cover (purple hair) seems a little dark when using the full mockup, and works better in a stand alone, in-line, or floating variant.

Composite standard, using the 'Apple' style devices, after removing the shadow (edited)

Stand alone standard with spine

Back cover, using 'paper' as a spine (edited)

'In-line' (edited)

These are just attempts to create something different.

Combining the images above, slightly asymmetric, floating (edited)

Notice that the floating image above is actually wrong, as the 'paper' spine on the right wouldn't be visible on that side. There should be the regular spine, not the edges of the pages. See below.

Strangely enough, no one noticed?!? 🤔

Resolution

When preparing graphics for online usage, it's best to use at least twice the destination resolution, so that down-sampling results in 'crispy' images and texts.

So, although Amazon suggests the source image to be 1600 x 2560 pixels, a much smaller image will be shown on screen as a thumbnail, where it might be at best 160 x 256. Which means that your cover must both look good when zoomed in upon, as well as when it's just a thumbnail. That works well with some covers, and not with others. You'll just have to try.

Simplified covers with 'fatter' text and less detail work better at low resolutions, thus may be a better choice for platforms such as Wattpad!

For example, WattPad suggests 512 x 800 pixels for their site.

Print

Print shops mostly list 300 dpi as target resolution. For a 9" x 6" paperback that means 1800 x 3200 pixels.

In the images above I used 1024 x 1600 for the artwork, which is a bit on the low side. Great for Wattpad, but not good enough for print.

What might work is the following approach:

1. Remove all text from your artwork

2. Upscale the artwork to whatever is good enough. My originals were 1024 x1600, and I up-sampled them to 2048 x 3200 which seemed to be just good enough. Use a multiple of 2 to avoid introducing new artifacts.

3. Redo all text at this higher resolution. Because you redo the text at a higher resolution it will look sharp and properly anti aliased, and will stay that way when downscaling.

4. Resize (downscale) the whole cover if necessary. Check what sizes your printshop or online platform can handle. Some systems can't handle weird sizes or ratios, or introduce their own artifacts when resizing.

5. Do a test print. Don't be surprised if you have to redo the cover if the print turns out ugly...

AI Art

On the use of AI art... If you're a writer, I can imagine that you'll be focused on your book, not on the artwork. A can understand people prefer human made artwork, but (small, amateur, self publishing) authors can't always afford a professional artist.