'Servants' dustjacket (3)

Firstly, this is going to be a paperback dustjacket. So I am looking at a smaller book and may well want to follow conventional marketing practice and come up with a totally different design.
Technically, I'm going to use two very differnt images- a digital image taken here in my home for this assignment (i.e. the gloves and cleaning bottle) and a scanned image of a very small creased black and white photo taken over a hundred years ago in poor condition mounted on cardboard. While the end result will hopefully be visually interesting, it may well have poor reproduction qualities...So..

First attempt:

 

P619

Looking to make the table appear more 'natural',I introduced a degree of perspective in P620. I used the clone tool to extend my grandmother's dress to seem as if it sat between the legs of the table.

P620

Then a different approach..this time in P621 making a more 'in your face' juxta position of images to contrast the images. Not sure this works that well ...too much out of sync...

P621

What difference does a change of background make in improving the visibility of image or purely from a marketing approach making the design more eyecatching on a bookshelf? I think this blue brings out the detail more than the sepia style version.

P622

In the end, I opted for a change of colour in the background but keeping the texture of the old photograph to retain the sense of its age. Adding in the title and author details produced two versions for the end result. I prefer the second one P624 as being more eyecatching with the all color background and larger image than the framed picture - a little reminiscent of the original jacket design.

P624

P632

However, the quality of the final result was poor. This was due I suspect to using a scanned version of the original picture of my grandmother which was poor quality. The scan was done a few years ago on a very basic machine with no regard to what use might be made of it in the future e.g. reproducing it digitally. There may be techniques that I could have used during this assignment to improve the quality here but I am not  sure what these might be ..a learning point to be pursued.