PSC15: Add Your Logo

In today's Photoshop Corner, we'll get a bit more playful and add a graphical logo to an existing picture.

The Source

First of all, we'll need a picture that we can work with. Something with a smooth surface in the spot where we want to add the logo will be a good starting point and make things easier, but as you get better doing this, you can use all sorts of things and add your logo to much more complicated images.

Now in our case, and because this year Germany will host the soccer worldcup, I've decided to take a picture of a soccer ball. The way I chose to take the picture is to place it on a reflective surface in order to illuminate the bottom of it and give it some strong backlight from the right side in order to have some good reflection on it.

The Setup

The Picture

Cleaning It Up

As we see, our soccer ball has some nice smooth surfaces, however, there's a big logo in the way that we'll have to get rid of first. There are quite a few tools within Photoshop that can help us there, and the ones that I went for were the Spot Healing Brush which has been introduced in Photoshop CS2, and the Clone Stamp. The easiest way to work with those tools is to add a new layer to your picture, and then in the tool bar of the according tool select "Sample All Layers". This way, you won't destroy your original image, but add your edits to a new layer which you can then modify later on or even dump altogether if you're not happy with your edits.

The Cleaned-up Image (crude job, but good enough for now...)

The edits I did on this picture were painted in gradually, step by step, first using the Spot Healing Brush, then the Clone Stamp, going back and forth between the two. And in the end I blurred the resulting changes a bit in order to make them slightly smoother. If you look at the picture, you'll see that I could have done a better job, but I'm not too worried about this, as we'll later on cover up most of it with our logo.

Logo Magic

Now comes the fun part. Open your logo in Photoshop, and by dragging it over to the soccer ball image by using the move tool, add it as a new layer on top of the cleaned up image. We are now just a few steps away from our final result.

First, let's look at the soccer ball. Using a our logo right out of the box won't work, because if it doesn't bulge in the same way (or at least a similar way) as the soccer ball does, it won't look right. So the first step is to make the logo bulge a little. For this I used Photoshop's lens correction tool and added some barrel distortion to the logo. You could also try with other tools, such as the Pinch filter or the Warp tool. This really depends on the type of image and the geometry that you want to achieve.

Second, I resized the logo to fit the target spot, and I turned it a little. This is easiest done with the Free Transform tool, which you can access pressing CTRL-T on your PC or Option-T on your Mac.

Now that we have the geometry right, it's time to zoom in to 100% and see if the logo and the soccer ball have the same amount of blur. And yes, this is really important for all types of composites. In my case, the logo is much sharper than the image, so I use the Gaussian Blur tool and adjust the logo's blur to look as similar to the soccer ball as possible. This will greatly help to blend the two pieces together.

But we're still not done. Right now, the logo is still sitting on top of the soccer ball but it doesn't feel like it's a part of it. In order to fix that, we'll have to find the right blending mode for the logo layer. For blending something dark onto something bright, I found that setting the layer to Multiply works fairly good. But this highly depends on the actual image, and you'll have to try a few of the blending modes to find the one that works best for you.

Conclusion

You see, it's not that hard to come up with new things based on existing images, and of course you don't have to limit yourself to inserting logos into existing images. The three most important things you'll have to get right for convincing results is to have the same amount of blur, the right geometry and the best blending mode for your image.