7 Best Album Cover Makers: Free & Paid Software
Create hot music albums with awesome design tools
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Key notes
- Since the cover is the first visible part of your album, use covert art software to create a captivating one.
- Some of the tools are dedicated to advanced users who need detailed elements while others have pre-made templates to speed up the task.
- Work with the best software to make album covers to mesmerize your audience from the beginning.
Are you a musician who just finished recording an album? If you’re looking for ways to design your album cover at an affordable price, this article is for you!
Album covers are frontal illustrations of a compilation. It is the first visible part of an album. Hence, it needs to be captivating.
Musicians often tend to hire the services of the professional album cover makers such as graphic designers.
However, with recent developments in graphic design, there are now simple online tools, which have been developed to facilitate the design of album covers, at little or no charge.
The aim of this guide is to present some of the best covert art software to get.
What is the best album cover maker software?
InPixio Photo Studio Pro 12 – Easy to use
inPixio Photo Studio Pro 12 is another image editing software that can be used to create cover art. The application offers a background eraser feature allowing you to remove any unwanted objects from your photos with ease.
If needed, you can also cut out objects from any picture with just a few clicks. The software is fully automated, so you don’t need any professional image editing skills to do so.
Image correction is available as well, and thanks to this feature, you’ll easily adjust your colors to get the best results.
Overall, inPixio Photo Studio Pro 12 is a simple but powerful software, and if you need to create photomontages or album covers, this might be the right tool for you.
You will benefit from the following key features:
- Simple to use
- Background and object removal
- Perspective editing
- Available on Mac and PC
- Share on Facebook and Twitter
- Sky switch
Photo Studio Pro 12
If you need a simple, fast, and powerful image editor, InPixio Photo Studio Pro 12 is just what you need.Adobe Express – Best integrations
Without a doubt, Adobe is the most prominent maker of graphic design tools, and as expected, they take the lead in the cover art software category.
While it might not be the foremost product of Adobe (unlike Photoshop & Illustrator), it is arguably the best album cover software (maker) in the market today.
Adobe Express is equipped with best-in-class imagery functions and pre-set formatting, which can easily be customized to suit your desires.
It also hosts a wide range of captivating themes and graphics, with suitable layouts, customizable fonts, and texts (typography). Essentially, you don’t need advanced graphic design skills to use the software.
Furthermore, Adobe Express is completely customizable, as you are afforded the opportunity of importing photos/images from either your device’s gallery or from the web (cloud storage).
In fact, you are presented with a wide range of options (themes, colors, fonts, etc.) to choose from, with respect to your music genre and inner feeling.
You are also able to choose from various album cover designs and create astonishing artworks that will convince the audience to press play.
The personal touch is necessary, so you can add your brand effortlessly using personal elements like stage names or logos right on the front page.
In addition, the software hosts web support, which makes it accessible via any standard browser on Windows 10 (and other desktop versions), as well as on mobile platforms.
With this, you are afforded the convenience of creating your album cover anywhere the inspiration sparks up. Also, designed album covers can easily be shared online via Social Media or printed out, for CD covers.
Lastly, Adobe Express is the ideal cover maker for upcoming artists who are still operating on a low budget. The software allows you to create your own album cover at no or little charge.
Take a look at its best features:
- Integration with other Adobe products
- Extensive library of ready-made graphical elements
- Simple and intuitive interface
- Easy sharing
- Great library of themes and templates
Adobe Express
Create stunning album covers to compliment your musical skills and share your artwork instantly!VistaCreate – Rich collection of album cover templates
If you want to create a cool album cover, you definitely need to check out VistaCreate. It is a cloud-based app that offers a complete toolset to edit and create any kind of artwork.
However, although you can build any type of image, poster, card, and even presentation, this tool has a huge library of album cover templates.
On a simple search, we’ve found 672 templates for album covers and many of them are simply free.
All you need to do is to create an account or just log in with your existing Gmail, Facebook, or Apple ID, and select a template you like.
Then, you can change any design or text feature inside with your own artwork to personalize your cover.
Even if you don’t have any images, graphics, or symbols, you may choose them from an existing library of thousands of fonts, styles, free images and backgrounds, and more.
In just a few minutes and some drag-and-drop actions, your album cover will be ready to become the big hit you wanted.
Let’s review some of its best features:
- Over 650 album cover templates
- Cloud-based web app available on any platform
- Easy, drag-and-drop functionality
- Social media templates for all the major platforms
- Ideal for marketing, advertising, and website content
VistaCreate
Create your album cover in minutes by using a huge collection of templates and editing tools.Adobe Photoshop – Best for professionals
Adobe Photoshop is probably the most prominent graphic design tool. But why is it not the first on our list of cover art software? The answer lies in its relative ease of use compared to other software.
Photoshop is graphic design software that requires a moderate level of expertise and training to successfully navigate its interface and make the best use of it.
In fact, creating an album cover requires special training. The software is the main go-to for professional graphic designers, especially those that specialize in album cover design.
It allows you to create an album cover from scratch. Upon completion, the album cover can easily be printed out. There are various versions of Photoshop, which are specially designed for Windows and Mac.
Some basic features include camera raw, 3D extrusion and video editor, eraser, color replacement, and more.
Take a look at its best features:
- Professional-level graphics tools
- Multi-layered designing
- All the tools necessary for graphics design
- Requires graphics design prior knowledge
Adobe Photoshop
Unleash your creativity and create the perfect album covers with the world’s best imaging and graphic design software.CorelDraw – Great for advanced users
CorelDraw is one software that loves creativity and is the go-to tool to materialize every single one of your creative projects, including album covers.
Powered by Corel, the Graphic Suite is more than mere software, it’s feature-rich and well-balanced.
It is a complete arsenal that brings you all the tools you need to produce jaw-dropping covers that mesmerize your audience before having the chance to even listen to the album.
And isn’t that what an album cover is all about?
Let’s quickly look at its key features:
- Professional vector illustration and photo editing
- Layout, font management, and typography tools
- Seamless integration across devices and platforms
- you need to create and complete important design projects, from virtually any device
- AI-powered imagery with bitmap-to-vector trace results
- Noise reduction capacities for fine-tuning, photo repair, and restoration
- Countless effects, masks, lenses, patterns, gradients, mesh fills, and more
- Color Replace, Color generator, and transparency tools for non-destructive editing
CorelDRAW
CorelDRAW is a professional tool for image editing, which makes it a perfect choice for creating album covers.Canva – Perfect for browser usage
Canva is the number one alternative to Adobe Spark, and to many, it is the best album cover software on the market. It is, basically, a graphic design tool with a wide range of applicability.
At present, the software has in excess of 10,000 users across the globe. Some of Canva’s prominent users include Netflix, Amazon, and more.
Basically, Canva hosts three different sets of features: graphs, photo editing, and printing. All these come with reliable support, to assist you all the way. Its website version is supported on desktops and mobile.
The album cover software offers a dynamic set of graphic design features, which include special fonts, a palette generator, photo editor, square-sized album layouts, colors, and more.
In fact, Canva hosts in excess of one million photos/images in its library.
Aside from that, there is also a pool of professionally designed album cover templates to choose from, which can then be remolded to suit your desires.
Also, you are provided with an avenue for designing your album cover from scratch. Typically, designing an album cover on Canva only takes a few minutes.
All you have to do is select a suitable cover layout, upload cover photos, add texts, fonts, images, and filters, remold the whole cover (if desired), and save the finished album cover.
You can then share it online or print it out for your CD albums.
Let’s review a few of its most important features:
- Cloud-based, available on any platform
- Lots of pre-made templates to choose from
- Great library of free graphical elements and fonts
- Simple, drag-and-drop functionality
- Built-in editor with all the tools necessary
Canva
This web app allows you to create cover art and other types of graphics with ease.Skylum Luminar 4 – Professional effects
The last cover art software on our list is definitely one that propelled itself into the top positions of the industry thanks to its amazing image editing capabilities.
If you thought that Luminar 3 was a gamer changer, this ultimate version will definitely shake your perspectives.
With unique retouching tools, non-destructive edits, and AI-powered imagery, Luminar 4 is an excellent choice for producing stunning album covers that will undoubtedly produce a lasting impact.
Use it freely on any device, from Windows to Mac, play with filters and effects, and enjoy all the amazing features until you get the result you expected or even better!
Let’s see a few of its key features below:
- Ai-powered image-enhancing tools
- One-click sky replacement
- Professional-grade image effects and filters
- Works on any platform and most devices
- Simple and intuitive menus
Luminar
Luminar is a simple but powerful photo editor, so it’s perfect for both professionals and beginners alike.There are now various reliable cover art software, which can easily be employed to create album covers within minutes, thereby saving you valuable time and money.
In light of this, we have outlined some of the best album art maker software to download and use immediately.
While you’re in graphics design, you might be interested in checking our list of the best poster and banner design software.
If you have contrary opinions to the tools outlined above, feel free to let us know in the comments section.
