From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

763 Adding a photo element to your vector logo

From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

763 Adding a photo element to your vector logo

- Hey gang, this is Deke McClellan. Welcome to Deke's Techniques. Now last week, you may recall, we created an entirely vector based logo inside Photoshop. This week we're going to replace that stylized background with a photographic image. Just to demonstrate how versatile this concept is. Now I should say that the most recent version of Photoshop CC includes this thing called a Frame Tool, which allows you to draw rectangular frames the way you might inside, let's say InDesign, and then you can plop an image inside of it. But if you're a professional user, you'll still want to stick with clipping masks as we're going to do inside of this movie. I should also say that we are going to scale this artwork because it's made largely of vectors, we're going to scale it to any size we like using the image size command, and because it offers the interpolation method of Preserve Details 2.0, it's going to do a better job than you can do inside of either InDesign or Illustrator. Here, let me show you exactly how it works. Alright, here's the photographic reveal, just so you have a chance to see it onscreen. And this is the entirely vector based logo, which has a file name of nothing but vectors.psd I just want you to see that. It'll come up in just a moment. And so I'm going to switch over to this photographic image from the DreamsTime image library, about which you can learn more and get some great deals at dreamstime.com/deke.php Notice that the yard layer is selected here inside the Layers Panel. And in recent versions of Photoshop CC you can copy an independent layer, just by going up to the Edit menu and choosing the Copy command, or you can press Control+C or Command+C on the Mac. In older versions of the software you would first need to go the Select menu and choose All, and then go to the Edit menu and choose Copy. Alright, so with that image in the clipboard, I'll go ahead and return to the Edit menu and choose the Paste command or you could just press Control+V, or Command+V on the Mac. And notice that I've set the image so it's the exact same width as my logo file, but it's not quite as tall, and so I'll switch to the Move tool, which I can get by pressing the V key, and I'll go ahead and drag this guy upward so it snaps to the top of the canvas. I want to make sure that the first value in that heads up display reads zero, so that I'm dragging straight up and down. And if necessary you can go ahead and press and hold the Shift key. Alright now obviously, I don't want this yard layer to be in front of the door or the edge layers, I want it to behind, like so, but I also want to clip it into the sky layer. Currently the lawn layer is in the way, but if I move the lawn layer on top of the yard layer, that would be a problem as well. So what I need to do is take both yard and lawn, so I'll click on one, and shift click on the other, and group them both inside the sky layer, so that the sky is serving as a clipping mask. And you can do that with both of those layers selected by going into the Layer menu and choosing Create Clipping Mask. So notice the yard and the lawn layers are selected, the sky layer is not. And that goes ahead and takes both of them and puts them inside the sky layer, as we're seeing here. Alright, now the great thing about this approach is that everything but the photograph is a vector. And so we can scale this artwork to any size we like. By going up to the Image menu and choosing the image size command, and if you like you can make that dialog box a whole lot larger as well. So you want to make sure that the Resample checkbox is turned on. And that the width and height values are linked together. Then go ahead and switch to whatever unit of measure you like. I'll go with inches. Notice right now, this thing only measures eight and a third inches wide, but I can change it to 48 inches if I want to. So my image dimensions are going to jump, and notice how far, they're going to jump to 576%. Well in that case, you might want to switch the interpolation option, here, from automatic to, if you got it, Preserve Details 2.0, which is the best way to work. Now it's only going to affect the photographic image, the vector based shape layers, and the text layer are going to scale without any interpolation whatsoever. You really don't need to worry about reduced noise. And if you want, you can try to locate where in the world the image is here inside this preview. I might just go ahead and zoom out a bunch of times until it appears. There it is. It's not really going to be representative though. Because it's going to show the text and shape layers as if they're being interpolated. Just bear that in mind. In any event, just go ahead and click OK. Now, I'm not sure I recommend you necessarily doing this along with me, unless you're really dedicated to this process, because it's very possible it's going to take a long time depending on the speed of your machine. This machine is actually pretty darned speedy. And yet as you can see, we're still hung up here on the progress bar. Alright, when it completes I'll press Control+0, or Command+0 on the MAC to zoom out, and you can see that I'm zoomed all the way out to 4.35%, so I'm way out here. I'm just going to press and hold the Z key in order to get the zoom tool on the fly, and then I'll drag to the right like so, until I get to about a hundred percent, and if I release the mouse button before I release the Z key, then I'll spring back to my Move tool, and you can see that we have some very sharply defined type, indeed. And all the vectors are also very sharp. Now, the photographic image is going to appear to have suffered a little bit, and it's going to start getting gummy, but bear in mind that we just interpolated the heck out of it and this is still better than InDesign or Illustrator would do, because neither of them would attempt to interpolate the image at all. They would just go ahead and grow the pixels. Alright, so I'll go ahead and press Shift+F in order to enter the full screen mode, and I'll press Control or Command+0 to fit the image onscreen. And that is how you add a native pixel based photographic element to your otherwise scalable vector based logo here inside Photoshop. Alright, now some of you are probably thinking, "Gosh, Deke, It's December for heaven's sake!" And now your voice might not crack like that, but that's what you're thinking. Which is why in deference to the holidays, I'm going to show you how to take this wintry image and we're going to add some high resolution synthetic snow inside Photoshop, and we will not be doing so using a combination of ad noise and Gaussian blur. We're going to be doing something much, much better. Deke's Techniques, each and every week. Keep watching.

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