Create Ebook Cover

I am one of those "geeks" who buys almost every software (short of Adobe Photoshop) that has something to do with grapics. Seriously, I'm bitten by the bug and there's no cure that I know of. Mind you, I'd probably ignore any available treatment anyhow :-)
Since I do lots of online stuff I must have tried every known avenue - software, tutorials, action scipts, templates ... from here to kingdom come - to produce decent looking e-book covers.
And sure enought, I can get the job done when I put my mind to it. Like the example to your right here. This is for a project I tested out. Not too shabby if I dare say so myself (uhh... I just did, didn't I?). And yes I'm a martial arts buff - no brownie points for figuring that out :-)
But the time... it takes so darned (pardon my French) much time!
It is absolutely possible to buy a set of grapics from a professional designer. That is, if you really, really need the pro look and you insist on getting rid of lots of cash...
Or, you can surrender and purchase Photoshop + some suitable action scripts ... again a costly affair. I have tried this, and also tested out the excellent, free and very powerful GIMP. These tools are not as simple to use as you perhaps may have been led to believe. And also, you need to fire up these memory-eating software 'beasts' just to make a simple cover. Not good.
Then, quite by chance, I stumbled across something called ECover StudioFX. From my testing so far this really looks to be the timesaver I sorely needed!
The results are great (I have supplied some extremely quick-fix examples for you below, and will get you some more original ones), and it's super, fast.
I suggest you check out for yourself how to create ebook cover with this stand alone application.
And the price? Almost unheard of, silly cheap :-)

How long did this take? Well, how does three minutes in total sound to you - sounds good to me! All it would take to make the left example into a full fledged cover is to add some text to the original image - which would take another couple of minutes.
So, in order to make an original ebook cover I reckon you would spend some time on the image/graphic, adding text and all that. Once you have that, making any type of cover with ECover StudioFX is easy as a walk in the park. Really - I'm impressed big time!
Both images below are in transparent .png format. They are both looking slightly more "jagged edged" here than the originals saved with the software - I guess that has to do with saving it here.
You'll also notice that the shadow has been "chopped" a little on one of the covers - that's just me being a little fast on the trigger to crop the image :-)

Naturally, you would need to trim the images and size them so that they sit well on your page, but that's very easy to do - you can resize all you want inside the software.

Just found and older image I had lying around and slabbed it on. One minute of tweaking, and voila...
I think that in order to have the best results this image was a little on the large side (size-wise). In the detailed tutorial video that comes with the ebook maker software, the optimal sizes are clearly outlined for you.