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| IMPORTING A LOGO OR IMAGE |
As near as I can
tell, the ability to 'import' an image from the web or a scanned logo is the main reason why people started using outside paint programs for cars in the first place. A lot of company logos are dang near impossible to re-create (unless you're an expert with Illustrator and have a degree in Graphic design). So our only option for getting the logo of a favorite company on a car is to take an existing image of the logo and put it on the car.
If you hunt around on the web, you'll find an incredible array of images and company logos. Every day, new companies get a site up on the web, and they're just elated to stamp their branding and logos all over it. This is good for you, because if you can snake one of those logos, I'm going to show you how to put it on your car. There are some good tools available to you for finding logos off the web. Probably the best one is Lycos' Richmedia search. It works like a normal search, except that it only links to images that match your search criteria. This saves you from having to hunt and scroll through webpage after webpage to find a logo. You should also always try the domain of the company who makes the product you're looking for. Let's say you want a Castrol GTX logo& type 'www.castrol.com' into the URL bar and see what's there. ;) Hotbot also has a picture only search.
You can also scan in a logo from a magazine ad (Stock Car Racing Magazine is a good one for this) and import that as well. I'm not going to teach you how to scan something in. I'll let you hunt for another tutorial for that. <G>
Now, let me give you some advice on what a good candidate for importing is. It has one color in the background, and doesn't have any textures or objects behind it. You also want as big a logo as you can get. You can always shrink digital images down, but when you have to make them bigger, you get this ugly pixellation and blurring. Here's an example of what happens when you blow up an image:
Pretty ugly, huh? So try to get a logo image that's at least 200x200. That's about the size of the hood when editing at twice the size. Let's use Bobby Labonte as an example again. ;) You don't have to do this with me, just pay close attention.
Once you've got your logo (there it is over to theright ->), do any touch up work that's necessary. What we want to do is get the logo all by itself on a solid color background. Just for the heck of it, I'm going to put this Interstate logo on a white car. A lot of times, images that have been compressed (like .gifs and .jpg's) have solid color backgrounds, but with a few off-color pixels. Use the fill tool with the tolerance set to about 30 to get all those pixels the same color. Now use the dropper tool and right-click on the background, we want that color to be our background color, and here's why...
... When you
have the background all one color, you can copy the image and
then paste it onto a new layer on your car as a 'transparent
selection' (SHIFT-CTRL-E). What you
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get is just your logo
with a selection area around it (see below). Now you can do an
additional outline around the logo, or maybe run a flame or
glow filter, or even bevel or chrome it (those require filters
as well). I use the deformation tool to resize, adjust, and
place the logo onto the car hood, and even the ¼ panels if I
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want the logo there.
Now, let's say your image has a white background, and your car's base color is, let's say, blue. You're going to get a few white pixels around the edges that look really tacky. What I do is do a 1 pixel outline in white on the layer below, and that makes it look like you INTENDED for there to be a white border, and makes the car look sharp. In my experience, the 'remove white matte', 'remove black matte', and 'defringe' options under the selections menu don't work worth a darn. They're supposed to remove any off-colored pixels on the outside like that, but they don't.
That's basically all there is to it.
Preparing the logo image is the key. Getting a good image to
work from, and then getting a solid color background can make
or break how your logo looks on the car. Sometimes you'll want
to run some color adjustments on the logo when you put it on
the car. Try increasing the saturation if the colors are a
little blah. Adjusting the contrast up a few notches also
works. You'll find both of those under the 'Colors' menu,
under 'Adjust'. ;)
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Guess what, you're almost done! I just want to talk about how I put on the little extras, and I use a new kind of decals for that. Click Here to check that out.
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