Step 01.
First thing you need to learn is ?the point of view? or ?perspective point? and what it means in graphics. Easy way to explain it is through practical experiment. Since you are reading this tutorial you are probably in front of your monitor. If you look directly at the monitor all that you see is the front screen and this is called ?one point perspective?. ?Two point perspective? would be if would lean to the left or right so that you can see your screen and one of the sides of your monitor (not so easy with TFT, but you get the idea). If you raise your self up a bit so you can see your screen, side and top of your monitor, than you are viewing it from the ?three point perspective?.
Take a look at these images:
One point perspective
Two point perspective
Three point perspective
One pint perspective is the view from the front on the observed object.
Two point perspective is the view from the corner.
Three point perspective is the view from the corner and above.
OK now that this is understood you can already see how you can create the effect, but let?s continue and see if we can enhance these three perspectives a bit more to make them look even better.
You can use any of the above perspectives to achieve the desired effect, but ?one point perspective? is not giving you that 3-D look you are looking for, but it can definitely help you in a whole different way.
Step 02.
Personally I prefer ?two point perspective?, but I guess you are not me so I will explain ways to create both of the above.
Create a new document in Photoshop 500x500 in 72 dpi. This are a good dimension for this effect and dimensions of the file created. Since you will be placing the image on the net, you wish it to be good looking and small in dimensions so your visitors can browse fast. 500x500 is ideal since you will probably show the final image in small thumb and full view. Thumbs are commonly somewhere from 50x50 to 150x150, and full view is somewhere from 250x250 to 500x500. This is why we are making it in them max resolution because if you are going to resize your images in the Photoshop make sure you always reduce the size, because increasing the dimensions can create blurred and pixilated images.
Create new layer and name it ?Side?. This will be our side of the 3-D shape. I know some tutorials suggest using ?marquee selection tool?
for creating shapes, but I like to use ?polygon tool? 
with ?paths? option selected in dialog section for the Polygon tool 
, you can find it in the upper line right under the main menu bar.Step 03.
OK, some more tips. First thing you must learn about shapes in the nature is you have to simplify everything you look at. Quick example is human head can be observed as an elliptical sphere, arm and fingers as cylinders and so on. Same is with 2-D objects, and in our example we will work with rectangle shapes to achieve 3-D look, pretty cool, ha?!
Start by creating new layer and drawing an even sided rectangle. You can do this by clicking somewhere in the middle of your document window and while pressing SHIFT+ALT keys drag mouse pointer toward one corner. You will get outlined square, and this is vector outline, and it presents only a borders of your shape.
Press ?A? key on the keyboard and click inside of the square and four square dots will appear. These are called ?anchor points? and are used to manipulate the shape. Take a look at how it should look:
Now you press ?P? on the keyboard to select pen tool and start manipulating your shape. To achieve the ?two point perspective you have to put your self in position of a frog, OK I know it may sound weird but this is actually the term they use to describe the pint of view where you look at the things from below, go figure.
With this in mind you will adjust the shape accordingly. OK another special term, ?vanishing point?. It is commonly used with perspective, and it represents the point where the lines intersect. Take a look at this illustration:
We have to keep this in mind when creating the perspective. As you can see, lines are inclined and this creates the illusion of observing the object from above or below. Cool stuff!
Keeping all of these things in mind we start adjusting our square shape. First you create the main side, which will present the cover of the book.
Step 04.
With Pen tool selected hold CTRL and click and drag one of the anchor points. You can also press SHIFT key for precise manipulation. Play with it a bit until you get comfortable with the tool, you can always start again if you mess up something
Work it until you have a shape similar to mine here:
Quick tip: if your anchor points get stubborn and refuse to cooperate, just create another anchor point by clicking with pen tool on any of the lines and delete this anchor right away. This way all pints become editable again, at least it?s the way I do it, but it can only be applied on straight lines.
Step 05.
Selecting ?A? or ?Direct selection tool? again you can now move your shape and position it a bit to the lover right hand corner. Also choose a color, I used 80% Grey swatch and click on the ?Create new fill or adjustment layer? icon
found in layers palette. Choose Solid color from a menu and this is the result:
Your layer will get this vector mask so you can edit it later if needed.
Step 06.
Click background layer and create new layer. Using the knowledge you gained from previous steps create new side of our 3-D shape, here is how it?s suppose to look:
3-D shape, just like that!
Step 07.
OK now you have your 3D shape and it?s ready to be textured. I suggest you to save this as a separate file so you can use it later. Now the texture and applying the actual book cover.
Choose an image you wish to use. If you are doing an e book cover, than you will probably have a pretty good idea what will be a cover picture but here I will use one of my images I did a while ago. It is a fantasy image so I will make a fantasy e-book cover.
I import the image into my file and resize it accordingly:
Now you have to adjust the image to fit the general shape of the cover, do this by pressing CTRL+T to enter Free transform mode, right click and select ?distort?. Now just drag the points to fit the image into the 3d shape:
Step 08.
Duplicate the layer with large square and change its color. You can do this by double clicking the ?layer thumbnail?, you will find it easily. I used black colors, to create that vide screen effect, like this:
Duplicate the other square layer and change its color too. I also used black:
Why am I not using original layers? Well I like to keep a copy so if I mess something up I can easily fix it, simple as that. Here is the layers structure so far:
Step 09.
Create new layer and name it ?highlights?. Now we will create some atmosphere in our image. Hold CTRL+SHIFT and click Color fill 1 and Color fill 2 layers to select them. Choose white as your foreground color and now press New layer fill or adjustment layer icon like you did in Step 05, only this time use Gradient option and use these settings:
Set layer to Overlay mode and decrease Opacity to 50%, here is the result:
Step 10:
All that is left is to add your text and adjust to correct position, have fun with it, here is my final result:
I added some text (I know font is cheese let go of it
and a shadow, and you can play with it adding who knows what else, have fun with it!!!maliDM
