The Final Cover

TLDR: A photo retouch for the last issue of Curl magazine — Issue 30, country star Ashley McBryde, and one very deliberate shade of blue.

Every magazine cover starts as a negotiation between what you’re given and what you can make of it. This one arrived as RAW files from country musician Ashley McBryde’s team — a gift, honestly, because working from RAW means working with the full range of what the camera captured. I prefer it that way. More data, more control, more room to make the image what it needs to be.

Curl was the magazine I founded and ran for eight years, so this wasn’t just any cover assignment. It was the last one. Ashley’s team had actually requested we handle the edit and retouch ourselves, which suited me fine. We’d sent cover guidelines in advance — sharp focus on face and curls, eye contact if possible, confident and authentic expression, vertical composition with room for the logo, high-resolution files — and what came back was a strong image with one thing that needed reimagining: the background. Warm, muddy tan. Fine for some contexts, wrong for this one.

I asked Ashley’s team if I could change it. I had a specific color in mind — a soft, cool blue-gray that I knew would do two things: make her eyes pop, and offset the beautiful gray streak in her hair. They said yes. The rest of the retouch covered skin, lighting, and overall color grading — but notably not hair. A rule I held throughout the magazine’s run: we never edited hair to add volume or remove frizz. Curl existed to show naturally curly hair as it actually is, not an idealized version of it. The curl pattern, the texture, the frizz — that’s the point. But the background shift was the transformation. Same woman, same pose, completely different feeling. The before is a photograph. The after is a cover.

This was issue 30. The final issue. Ashley McBryde was a significant get for an independent magazine — it happened because one of our contributors knew her bass player, which is exactly how things work when you’ve spent years building real relationships in a community. The “Final Issue” banner started as a free vector file that I reshaped and recolored into something that felt worthy of the moment — arched instead of flat, gradient gold instead of plain.

Thirty issues. Eight years. One last cover that I’m genuinely proud of.