Creation of the table of contents and cover!

For the past 2 days I have been working on my table of contents (I'm editing my entire magazine on Photoshop). I was going to start with my cover, but I had a lot of trouble with it. This is because the pictures I took are in landscape and they need to be portrait for the cover. I tried many different things to convert it to portrait (I was watching so many youtube tutorials) such as content aware fill, clone stamp tool, morphing the image. They all did not look good. I spent hours and hours trying to fix it and it was stressing me out. I ended up doing a simple fix of just rotating it, and it actually doesn't look that bad:

I also decided to change which photo I am using for the cover because I didn't like they way the picnic blanket image was coming out. Every font and color I chose did not look good with it (and I tried every color). That was also something that I spent hours trying to make look good. I ended up using the photo that was intended for my double page spread, and it looks much better. Basically, I have struggled a lot with my cover, and I went through a lot of trial and error. Here is how it looks now:

I am not sure about where to put storylines.

My table of contents, on the other hand, was easy for me to do since I had a vision for it. I love the way it came out. I am not sure if I should go with the blue or white table of contents. (Blue is my color scheme which I posted in my older post).  Since I had made the table of contents before the cover the blue was darker, so when I made the cover a lighter blue I had to change the blue in my table of contents so it would match.

The white table of contents is with the old font, the blue is with the new one.

I used arial for the description part of the table of contents and chapaza for the page numbers. The masthead is mermaid.

For all the images in my table of contents I edited them all on Photoshop.  I used the dodge tool to make them lighter. This was probably the most useful tool. I also used the magnetic lasso tool to cut out the image. I was going to keep the food's original shadow but I did not like the way it looked so I just used a drop shadow on Photoshop instead. The chocolate sauce gave me some trouble (before I figured out the smudge tool). I looked up how to create dripping effects, but nothing was coming out good. That is when I decided to just put the chocolate sauce photo I took in the magazine and try to edit it. That is when I found the smudge tool and made it look they way I wanted. I had to make the sauce a lot bigger and duplicated it to put the chocolate sauce on the other page of the contents. There was a gap between the two so I had to duplicate one of the chocolate sauce layers and cut out a portion of it to fill the gap. I used the smudge tool on the chocolate sauce to get rid of the flash and to make it look more gel-like. I also cut out a big streak of chocolate sauce because I didn't like how wide it was. I really like how it came out. These are how all the photos looked originally:

I was going to put flags that I hand drew in photoshop to put at the bottom of the table of contents (since it is a travel issue), but it took away from the food and I liked the table of contents without it(which is what my family told me-and I agree).

I also changed my font to something similar because I thought the other font was too skinny (which I found out while doing the cover). I used bevel & emboss to make the text more noticeable. This has been a long, crazy process but I love the way my magazine is coming out.