More and more fan sites are specifying that they do not allow logo cropping. To encourage creators to follow fan sites’ policies, this tutorial will share how keeping logos intact and highly visible can take seconds for future works.
Please direct questions to admin Tiffany at @deartaetae instead of to @btsgfx.
First, find a fan-taken photo that has your desired logo with the highest possible contrast between the logo and background (white logo on black or black on white). You want a crisp logo, so avoid having similar shades in the background touching the logo. Use the photo’s largest image size since a large brush preset is an advantage.
The example logo used in this tutorial is closed fansite, EHEH V’s logo.
1. Crop down to the area around the logo.
2. Now the goal is to increase the contrast so the logo is the only truly white/black object on your truly black/white background. You can achieve this through multiple ways, which will not all be outlined here.
The simplest way is to keep applying +100 in contrast through Image or Layer > Adjustment > Brightness/Contrast until the logo is truly white (#ffffff) or black (#000000) and the background is the invert. In this example, the background still did not reach truly white after 2 adjustments.
Continuously applying Brightness/Contrast adjustments may cause the edges of your logo to be jagged. Other methods you can use are Levels, Exposure, Replace Color, Selective Color adjustment on white (-100 blacks) and black (+100 blacks) channels on absolute mode, etc. These can all be found under Image > Adjustment or Layer > Adjustment Layer.
3. If there are other distracting objects the same color as the logo, cover the object with a round brush in the background color.
4. When you’re ready to create a custom brush from your logo, make sure the logo is black and the background is white. If the logo is white instead, select Image > Adjustments > Invert (CTRL or Command+I).
5. Next, select the logo area only (CTRL or Command+A if there are no distracting objects). Select Edit > Define Brush Preset at the top of the Photoshop window.
6. A dialog box will pop up to name the brush. Brushes in the dropdown menu are small preview icons. Give a useful name so in the future you can hover over the brush for the name to appear.
7. Now you have a 100% opacity brush for that logo to stamp on any future original works in whatever color you desire.
You can find your new brush at the very end of the brush options menu after selecting the brush tool. When applying do not increase the brush’s size above default to avoid pixelation. In this example the default size is 86px.
8. If you did not get the logo truly black, but did get the background truly white, you can click multiple times when you are applying the brush to get the logo to 100% opacity. This may look like fake bold on text however and lose the logo’s legibility.
Keep in mind these important notes.
1. The @btsgfx team interprets fan sites’ “do not crop logo" policy as you may move the logo, but it must be:
easily noticeable,
readable from the Tumblr dashboard without zooming in on the image,
and appear on each canvas with a fan-taken regardless if the fan-takens used are from the same fan site.
2. The best place to find out whether fansite does not allow logo cropping is on their data hosting site or a pinned tweet on their Twitter. Look for 로고크롭 (logo crop) followed by an X/하지 마세요/지합니다 or O/✓. Resources and details about our fan site policies can be found on our Policies page.
3. Do not share your brush presets with others. Fan site logos are fan sites’ intellectual property so these brushes should be only for personal usage.
