Tutorial: how I make my CD/DVD covers

Hello my friends.

Today I want to talk about DVD and CD covers. I often get questions about how I print them and what material I use. So I decided to answer them and hope it will help make it easier for you to create fantastic covers!

1) About labels 

I have no printer at home, so I use the services of photo-lab, which has a simple printer for printing on disks. Many of you may have similar printers or at least know about them. Their difference from the ordinary photo-printers is that they have a slot for a disk. 

I use special printable disks for printing my DVD and CD labels. I am sure that they are sold in every geographic area :). These are disks with a matt white surface that resembles paper to the touch. They are usually sold in 10, 25 ... 100 items in pack, but you may be able to find them singly.

If you have no printer for disks and can't find it in nearest photo-lab you can use any disks and special paper labels for CDs. These are papers that are die cut to fit CD’s and they have an adhesive base. If you use them, you will first print your image (that you have created with my templates) on it as you would on usual paper and then will stick it on your disk

2) About boxes

For DVD covers I usually use DVD jewel boxes 14 or 9 mm thickness. My templates are designed for 14 mm thick, but if you use boxes with a different thickness, you can simply reduce this size in the template. 

The boxes can be different colors or transparent, for 1 or 2 disks, it's doesn't matter.

For CD covers I usually use CD jewel boxes. The box can be different colors, for 1 or 2 disks. All they have the same main sizes, so you also can use slim boxes (but in this situation you'll have to design only front side of cover because slim CD boxes don't have a place for back side image. 

3) How to prepare your images for printing

First, you will need to know the exact size of the box that you want to use (I doubt that they are different in different countries, but it’s possible, so it's best to make sure and, if necessary, adjust the template. It's not difficult - just reduce or increase it before you start working on the design of your cover.

The second step - is to know the exact size of paper on which you will print your cover. 

I don't use any special-size paper because I have no printer at home. I go to a photo lab and print my covers as usual photo 20x30 cm (A4 size). I love to print my covers on photo-paper because this ensures vivid colors and good density of paper, so I know that I will not wrinkle my cover at a later stage. You just need to make sure that the size of the paper is a little bit larger than the cover. In my case it is 20x30 cm.

So before printing, I go to photoshop, create a new file with the exact size of paper which I will use and place my ready designed layout there, then save it as jpg. It looks like this for DVD cover:

To print a CD-cover I also use the 20x30 size of photo and place on it both front and back sides of my future cover (this LO is by Nataliya Zima):

You can use reduce the image & leave empty space to print small photos (for example, for wallet size photos ;))

When I give these files to the photo-lab, I ask them to print AS IS (without cropping or any other corrections on their side). Thus I am sure that I'll get exact sizes and colors of printed images.

After printing I have something like this:

4) Final steps 

All I need to do after printing is to collect all of the pieces and prepare to assemble , LOL :)))

I use a stationery knife and a ruler. You can use scissors if you prefer.

After you trim the white edges, your cover should look like this:

The final step is to insert the photo under the transparent surface of the box.

Ready!

This is the DVD with printed photos 15x21 cm

After the same actions for CD covers we will get ready CD cover:

Thanks for reading this long tutorial. I tried to combine all of the questions that you asked me about the covers for CDs and DVDs. I hope you find the answers to them, and that this tutorial was useful for you. If I did not respond to something that interests you, feel free to ask me questions in the comments to the tutorial.

Hugs,
Jasmin-Olya Designs