Creating the illusion of a logotype or text drawn in a surface is achieved with a simple blending effect in photoshop. This technique can be applied to any kind of image but i’ll illustrate it with a sharp stadium imagem with the club logo in the center. Let’s get started then. First lets grab a nice sharp image as our background. I simply made a search on google images and found this nice looking picture of chelsea’s football stadium.

Look at that perspective… it’s perfect. Then i went off and searched for a chelsea’s team logo. This is easy as you’ll find these images in the first results page on google images. This is the logo i’ve choosen:

By now i think you allready got the ideia on what i am going to accomplish here… Yep, that’s rigth. The logo will go in the center of the stadium, a pretty simple task, but we need to make that logo to appear to be drawn in the grass. Never the less, an easy task if you know basic layer blending techniques in Photoshop. You don’t? You are going to, rest assure.

First we need to convert the logo to grayscale (black, white and grays only) and do some tweaking to eliminate some gray colors. So lets start by converting the image. Of course, by now you should have both images open in photoshop. Select the logo and go to IMAGE menu and select MODE and then GRAYSCALE.

A dialog box should come up asking if you want to discard the color information. Well the answer is: of course! So click OK and the colors are gone.

Now we have our logo almost ready to put it on top of our background (the stadium). But first we need to tweak those blacks and whites a little bit. There are a lot of gray tones in that picture so what we’re going to do is to eliminate a lot of them leaving the image with less colors. Ultimately a pure black and white color image would be the best, but we’re going to leave a little gray to.

In order to eliminate some gray (converting them to black or white depending on the tone) we need to adjust the IMAGE LEVELS. So go on and select LEVELS from the IMAGE menu. Go to IMAGE menu, choose ADJUSTMENTS and the LEVELS.

You’ll get a dialog box with the leves histogram. In this box you need to grab the handles on the edges and push them in, thus reducing the gray colors on your image:

Push those handles in, towards the center of the axis like this:

As your’re dragging the handles you should see that the grays in your image will disappear just like in the picture above. Our image still has a white background around it but we will remove it after we paste the logo onto the stadium image.

So lets do a basic COPY-PASTE operation. Select the whole logo, copy it and paste it on the stadium image. You can do that with just the hot-keys (CTRL+A to select all, CTRL+C to copy and then CTRL+V to paste) or you can use the menus if you don’t feel too confortable with the hot-keys operation. So, go to the SELECT menu and choose ALL. Then select COPY from the EDIT menu. The image is copied onto the clipboard. Be sure to select the destination image before you paste. So select the stadium image, goto EDIT menu again and choose PASTE. The logotype should now be in a new layer on the stadium image, like the picture below:

The background image is a clear perspective, you can clearly see the grass lines going from the bottom to the top, converging into a point on the horizon. This is called a “Vanishing Point” wich simbolizes the height of the human eye, and we’re going to use these lines to put our logo into the same perspective.

You don’t need to draw these line, the center circle of the stadium has enough perpective nodes to help us on giving the desired perpective to the logo.

So lets get rid of the white areas in the logo. What we’ll be doing is to select all the white areas in the logotype layer and delete them. Difficult? Not really, because photoshop has a powerfull tool that does just that. It’s the MAGIC WAND, and you can select it on your toolbox beneath the MOVE tool. Be sure to have the logotype layer selected before selecting the MAGIC WAND.

When you select the MAGIC WAND you will notice a box appearing at the top of the screen, below the menu, with several options. These are the MAGIC WAND options and you need to precisely select some of them in order to remove only the white color and at one single time. The picture below shows you the options you need to tweak in order to select only the white in that layer:

A modest 24 tolerance ratio is enough to select all the white tones, and be sure to have anti-alias turned on and contiguous turned off. Now go on and click on a white spot on your image (the logo). You will notice that every white area is selected. It may appear a little messy (too much selections) but don’t worry the image is just too small to see clear surrounding selections.

With the selections on the screen just hit the DELETE key to get rid of all the white. That’s it. Plain and simple. Pure magic!

After you delete the selected area the selection is still loaded, so you need to clear it. Just hit CTRL+D to deselect it or go to SELECT menu and choose Deselect.

The last part is plain simple, you just need to transform the logo, putting it into perpective to match the circle beneath it.

So, go to the EDIT menu, choose TRANSFORM and then DISTORT. Then use the handles on the top and bottom to adjust the height. Also you can click on the image to drag it into place and use the corner handles to distort the image, creating the perspective illusion:

Press RETURN (The ENTER key, needless to say…) when you’re done. Don’t worry about some fuzziness in the image, it will go away after you apply the transformation… or maybe your zoom level is an intermediate one (you will only see clear and sharp images if you’re with a zoom level of 25%, 50%, 100%, 200% and so on…).

Finnaly, go to your Layers palette and choose the correct Blending mode for this Layer. The correct blending is “Soft Light”, as you’ll want to make the blacks semi-transparent, revealing the texture beneath them.

I am leaving the white lines in the stadium, as it should be, but you can clear those lines using the CLONE STAMP tool. Also you can correct the logo a little bit using the ERASER, with a very light soft tip.

And well, here it is! Go Chelsea!

Hope this tutorial helped you out. Be sure to keep visiting us for more eye catching Photoshop Tips and Tricks.