College Magazine Cover Plans - Developing my Plans and Ideas

This is my Magazine Cover that i have been developing and filtering with ideas.
I have now designed and decided upon my Masthead, Cover Image, Plug and Coverlines which are featured here.
I am planning on developing this by adding more coverlines and/or imagery.


Looking at this image; i was aware that it was starting to look very 'busy' with a mixture of very interesting photographs that contained lots of colour and images.
By opening up the image into Photoshop; i tested the idea of removing the background from the image.

This is a screenshot of the image before and after i used the Magnetic Lasso Tool to draw around the image that i wanted to 'keep' and then copy and pasted that into a new window.
This was my first attempt at this, so therefore the image was a little ragged; so i used the Refine Tool to adjust both the 'smoothness' and add a 'feather' texture to the image.
Following on from that i also used the eraser tool to remove any unwanted areas.

I also experimented with the Background Remover Eraser tool; which i used simply just to 'rub out' the background and unwanted areas of the photograph.
This was a very tricky and time consuming way of doing it, so i chose to holt the process and consider the image thoroughly.


This was a very lengthy and detailed process; and i am not sure if i am happy with the result. I am therefore looking into other ways to make my cover and it's imagery less 'busy'; perhaps by using all the 'blank' spaces in the image - especially the areas that don't contain the students to place the images and text.