Click on any phrase to play the video from that point.
[♪♪] [ADOBE TV Presents] [♪♪] [The Complete Picture with Julieanne Kost] Hi and welcome. My name is Julieanne Kost. In today's episode of The Complete Picture, we're going to take a look at how you can create a transparent logo in Photoshop. I'm going to assume that this logo is going to be used in Photoshop, so we're actually going to create two logos. We're going to use vector art to create our first logo, so this might be maybe a logo that you have. I'm going to show you how to make that into a watermark. Or it might be something like a signature, maybe a pixel-based scan that you've done. So we'll go ahead and work with both of those. And then in my next episode of The Complete Picture we're actually going to use that logo that we create, the vector art, and we're going to use that. By saving it in a different format, we're going to use that in Lightroom. But today we're going to focus on Photoshop. So we're creating watermarks or transparent overlays that you could use, say, for example, if you were running an action in Photoshop and wanted this to appear on every single one of your images. Okay. So let's get started. I have an image open here, and this is the image that I want to add my overlay to. So we have a variety of different vector-based tools in Photoshop. We have our Shape tools and we have our Text tools, and we have the Pen tool, of course, so you could draw your own if you wanted to. I'm going to go ahead and start with a Custom Shape tool. So you can tap the U key or go to your Custom Shape Tools. And you'll notice that right down here we actually have the copyright shape. I'm going to use that. Before I start drawing--because I actually want to get a good visual representation of this; I don't actually want to just look at the paths--I need to make sure that I've got this first icon selected. Let's see what we've got as our foreground color. It is white, so that's fine. I'm going to click and start dragging. But you'll notice that if I drag without holding down the Shift key, it doesn't maintain its proportions. So let's go ahead and hold down the Shift key. The great thing about vector graphics is you can create them any size and then they're infinitely scalable. So although this might not be the exact size I want right now, I can always change that and I won't lose any quality by scaling it up or down. So the copyright symbol, that's great. We've got it. Let's go ahead and add another layer to create our logo, and that is a text layer. You might be thinking, "Why didn't you just type the copyright symbol as text?" The reason is I actually want to put this text so that it kind of overlaps the copyright symbol. Let's go ahead and enter in 2011. And then I'll probably need a few spaces, and then I'm going to type in my name. And the reason that I want those spaces is so that I can have the 2011 inside the copyright symbol and have my name outside of it. I like the font that I have. Let's go ahead and change it to its regular family or face, and then I'm going to increase the size here. Because I'm not quite sure what size I want, there's a nice keyboard shortcut when you're working with the Type tool. That is, you can just hold down the Command key and then scale this up. And of course if you hold down the Shift key, that's going to maintain the proportions. I think I'm going to like something right about there. Only two issues: one, I misspelled my name, so let's type in an E; and the other thing is now I've got kind of this odd point size, this 17.49, so I'm just going to round that up to 18 and see how that looks. To apply that, we'll go ahead and click the check mark. It's a little bit too high, but we can just tap the V key to get our Move tool and just move that on down. Okay, and maybe over to the left a little bit. Since I've moved it over to the left, now I need to add a little bit more space here on the right-hand side. So I'll just add one more space. Okay. And we'll apply that change. Now if we look at my Layers panel, basically I have a shape layer and I have the type layer. I'm actually going to add one more layer, and that is another shape but in this case it's just going to be a Line tool. I think you'll be able to see-- You might not be able to see one pixel, so let's go ahead and increase that maybe to three pixels as far as the width goes here, because I want to make sure that when the video is compressed that you can actually see this line. You'll notice that if you hold down the Shift key it will draw out a straight line. So that's what I want. It looks a little bit odd right now because the path is actually targeted, and we know that because you can see here on my vector mask it's got the highlight around it. But if I just click on that again, it actually keeps the layer selected but it untargets the mask so that we can actually get an accurate preview of that stroke. I might want to move both the layer with the line and the text layer up just one, so I selected both layers in the Layers panel. We'll tap the V key to get the Move tool, and we'll just scoot those up a bit. Okay. You create the logo that you want. And at this point in time what I want to do is combine all three of those layers as one but I want to keep them as vectors. So it's a little bit tricky. Honestly, if I didn't want this interactive preview, if I didn't need to see all of the layer filled with white, I could have done it with just using shapes as opposed to shape layers. But I wanted to make sure that you knew where we were going, so I think this was the right way to do it. I'm going to grab the third layer for a minute, and I'm just going to put them into a folder or into a group here. Of course we can still see the contents of that group. And then I need to do one other thing too because right now I can't use that type layer as is. I need to go ahead and I'm going to make a duplicate of it just because in case I want to go back I might want that duplicate. So I've made a duplicate of my type layer, we'll turn off the actual type, and we'll go up here to the Layer menu. We'll go down to Type, and I'm actually going to convert this to a work path because what that will do is it'll convert that type layer and give me a path right down here. You can actually see that path. In fact, let's zoom in so that we can see what that path looks like, and let's turn off the type layer. I know it's gray, so it might be a little difficult to see, but there is my path. So that's fine. I've got my text as a path. But I also need my Shape 1 and Shape 2. So let's go ahead and click on the Shape 1 layer. I'm going to grab my Path Selection tool, select the path, and simply copy it, Command C, go to my work path and do a Command V. And it's really nice. It just automatically will paste it right in place. Then we'll go to Shape 2, which is my line, and I'll click on it, my Shape 2 Vector Mask. We'll go ahead and select it, copy that, Command C, go up to my work path, Command V, and paste it. So now I can turn off this entire group, but you can see that my work path has all three of these shapes. So this will be my combined logo. Excellent. So we're going to save that path. Sorry. I just double clicked on it. That's how it popped up the Save Path. You can also go to the Paths palette and actually it would have said here Save Path if it was still a work path. So that's how I save that. Okay. Let's go ahead and close that for now. Now, this path. How do I get the path actually saved and in a usable form? Well, it's very easy. All we need to do is select it. Once we've got it selected--actually, let's do a quick Select All there because I want the whole path selected. So I just used my cursor there with the Direct Select tool and just dragged it across all of that. And what I'm going to do is use the Edit menu to define this as a custom shape. But I might want to think about it before I define it as a custom shape because right now it looks a little bit too large. The beauty is obviously it's completely scalable, and because it's going to be a shape, that means it's going to retain its vector capabilities, and so I'll be able to scale it. But for right now I'm actually going to zoom out and I'm going to use Command or Control T. I know that usually goes to Free Transform. In this case it's going to transform my shape. And let's say that I want my shape to be about this big because that looks about right. This is a 6x6-inch image. This is typical for my smaller size images that I want to add my watermark to. So we'll hit Return or Enter to apply that. Now that it's at the right size, now I'm going to go here to Edit and define my custom shape. We're going to go ahead and call this jk Logo. And now that becomes part of my shape library. So if I switch tools here and go to my Custom Shape tool-- and let's go ahead and click off of that path so we hide it-- and we go up to our custom shapes, here is that custom shape. So now I can click and drag out this shape. Again holding down the Shift key to keep it proportional, I can drag it out to any size. But that's not exactly what I want because I want consistency. So what I'd rather have happen is I would rather have this be a defined size, and in fact I want it the size that I created it. So that's why I scaled it down a little bit because now it makes it really easy. I can click Defined Size. Now I don't have to drag out my custom shape. All I need to do is click in my image area, and it lays down my custom shape at the right size. So let's zoom in to that, make sure we can see what we're doing here once this image gets compressed. So I've put it down. I haven't put it down in the right place, but that's because I want to do a few other things. What might these other things be? Well, I don't want it to be opaque; I want it to be transparent. That was the whole point, right, so we could see through this. So how am I going to achieve that? All I need to do is add an effect. If I want to add something like a bevel and emboss, I can go ahead and choose that. But let's go to the blending options first, because what the blending options are going to allow me to do is decrease my fill opacity. When I decrease my fill opacity, we can no longer see the white fill. I'm going to leave just a wee bit of it up just so that we can kind of see what we're doing. And because you might not want to make this completely transparent, you might want to make it semi-transparent, this is how you control that, with the fill opacity. Then if we want to add our bevel and emboss, we simply click on that and then we can change any of these settings if we want to. We can soften it, we can make the direction go up or down, we can change the depth, we can change the angle at which it's applied. All of these different options here in the Layer Style options for the bevel and emboss. So let's say this is it, this is exactly what we wanted. What I'm going to do is I'm actually going to save this as a style. All we need to do is click on the Style area up here and click New Style. In the Layer Style dialog box, let's go ahead and call this Bevel and Emboss, and I'll just put Soft there because I know that I changed the softness values. The reason that I'm not calling this new style my logo style is I might actually want to use this for some other file with some other text at some other time. Once I click OK, it now becomes a style. And the reason that I did that is because you'll also notice that in my options now for my custom shape, I can apply that style by default. Isn't that great? So I don't have to remember to, "Oh, I've got to click to set down my custom shape "and then I have to apply my style." No. It's done in one step. In fact, I can save that combination, including the color that I want to add, by creating what's called a Tool Preset. So now we can click on this little icon here to save this, and I can call this my logo. Let's Select All. So jk Logo with Style White because I'm including the color, as you can see right below. Click OK. And now any time I need to add this to any file, I can do so. So let's go ahead and zoom back out here. It's a little bit subtle, but that's okay. I still like it. The weirdness is you can see when I've got that layer targeted the vector mask is kind of making it a little odd-looking. But all I need to do is just click on that icon and then we can see it without the vector path around it. Okay. So let's go to a different image right here. Let's say I want to add that same watermark. All I need to do is click and it's been added. Click on the mask to turn that off, and it's as easy as that. And of course I could incorporate that in an action if I wanted to as well. The only thing I might want to be careful of is if I am trying to add it to different size images, I would either want to include in my action a resize to make sure they're all the same size, or if I needed the images to be different sizes, maybe I want to record it in percentage, record the action when actually my ruler is set to percentage so that it would put down the action in a percentage location as opposed to a fixed XY coordinate. Okay. So that's the first way we can do this. The second way that we can create this overlay is by simply using a scan. So let's go to Bridge for a moment. And in Bridge I'm going to open up this signature. This is just my signature on a piece of paper, and you can see the paper in the background right there. Let's just go ahead and drag this by using the Move tool. We'll drag it onto one of these other open documents and then just drop it in. It came in too large, but I'm just going to scale it down. Since I'm not sure what size I do want this, it would probably be smart for me to right mouse click and convert this to a smart object. The reason I need to convert this to a smart object in this instance is because this is not a vector object. If I scale this down and then change my mind and scale it up, if I hadn't turned it into a smart object, I would be losing quality. And I don't want that because I'm not sure how large I want this. So Command T will go ahead and give me my Free Transform handles. Command zero--of course that would be Control T and Control zero in Windows-- will actually zoom me out so that now I can make this a bit smaller and just position it where I want it to be. So if we zoom in in that area, all I need to do to remove this white background is simply change the blend mode of this layer. So if I set it to Multiply, then I've got my black signature multiplied together over this background, which is going to get rid of all the white in that textured paper that I scanned it on. In fact, if it didn't get rid of all the white, I might want to use a little levels adjustment and just force everything that was almost white all the way to white so that it removes all of that. And of course if I don't want this to be black but instead I wanted it to be white, we could invert it. Because it's a smart object, I can't just do a Command I, which is the same as going to Image, Adjustments, and then Invert. You'll notice it's not available. What I need to do is use an adjustment layer, and I can clip that adjustment layer so that it only inverts this Layer 1, the signature, by clicking on this icon right here. And then we just choose the Invert Adjustment. Now what I have is a white signature on black. And if I want to get rid of the black and simply keep the white, all I need to do is go up under the Layer menu and change the blend mode. But I don't want to change it for my invert layer. I better go back down to Layer 1 and change this to Screen, and I've got my white signature overlay. Okay. So, excellent. These are two great ways to add your signature as an overlay on all of your images. My name is Julieanne Kost. Thanks for joining me on this episode of The Complete Picture. [♪♪] [Executive Producer - Bob Donlon] [Producer - Karl Miller] [Director - Kush Amerasinghe] [Post Production - Erik Espera] [ADOBE TV PRODUCTIONS] [♪♪]
