Album Cover - Idyllic Setting?

I captured a few good shots on my iPhone and edited them with an app called Instagram, which allows you to alter tones, contrasts, with autofixed choices. I used the same effect, called X-Pro II, in order to maintain a similar style on each of the photos. This app was very useful, as it was on my phone I could snap a shot whether i was on the bus, in the car, walking to school or when we were actually on location, and add the effect and save the photo there and then. I've taken many photos on this app and because of the effects we all agreed it suited the idea of having an idyllic setting as an album cover, so we went through them all and chose which ones we liked most. Out of them, a suprisingly plain photo ended up looking quite appealing. The colours were attractive, with a sillouette of a hill with a fence on the top, with the sun setting behind it. The picture gave us room to edit and also put in text and the two best ideas we had ended up like this:


What we liked about these adaptions of the photograph, were that they were very plain, with not a lot of writing or too many effects piled on top of eachother, which is evidently what a idyllic setting album cover is expected to be like. I personally prefered the picture on the right, because the contrast and brightness had been kept reletivly close to the original picture, whereas the picture on the left had been increased and enhanced. Furthermore, this allowed a clearer view of the sunset and the fence, rather than in the first picture in which there is just a bright light. Additionally, the titles are central with an all capital font, which is easy to see and easy to read. The centre line allows the viewer to notice straight away what the picture is, also not taking too much away from the picture, but creating more awareness of the artist and album, rather than just the beautiful shot. We liked the finished product and all agreed that the 2nd picture was a lot better, however, we still wanted to venture further into the other side of things. Time to look at grapic album covers...