Adobe Photoshop CC - Essentials Training

How to bend a logo onto an image realistically in Photoshop

Daniel Walter Scott

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Hi there, in this video we are going to look at kind of bending, distorting, and skewing. We're going to try and lay it down on the ground and then kind of morph it around the shoe here. So it looks like it's kind of following the curve. Let's do that now using Adobe Photoshop's Transform Tools. 
Let's open up the file we're going to be working with, 'File', 'Open'. We're working in the 'Exercise Files' in this folder called '08 Transform'. Open the one called 'Transform 01'. So we want to mock up this logo on this. Let's look at the basics for transforming first. We'll go and add the logo, so to bring in the image I can open it, copy and paste it, which we've been doing for a lot of this course. I'm going to show you another way. 'File', there's one that says 'Place Embedded'. Go to that same folder and open up 'Logo.ai', click 'Place'. It's going to put it into the Smart Object automatically because it knows it's an ai file and it goes, "You're vector, you should be Smart Object." And we're totally down with Smart Objects now. 
All we need to do is give it a size, and then hit 'Return' because it's kind of stuck in this kind of limbo mode. Can you see now, these things work. So if I hold down 'Shift', and we can scale it down. Scale it down to something appropriate like that, hit 'Enter'. What we're going to do is, we'll start with one copy just up here. We're going to duplicate the logo, right click. 'Duplicate Layer'. This is going to be called 'Logo 02'. We'll move it down, and let's look at the basics for transforming. 
Let's go to 'Edit', 'Transform'. We've dealt with Scale Before and Rotate Before. And some of the other easy ones that you might use is Rotate Clockwise, Counter clockwise. We'll go back the other way. You can flip it 180, which flips it completely upside down. Another one in there you might use is Flip Horizontal and Vertical. It's not going to really work in this case if I go Horizontal. Backwards logo, but it's good to know where that's kept. I'm going to undo. 
Next thing I want to do is I want to kind of bend it down the bottom here like we saw in the intro on the floor. And under 'Edit', 'Transform', you can see, a bunch of these are grayed out. Remember in the last video where we talked about Smart Objects, and most things work with it except for the very first thing we're going to do in this course after we've learned to convert everything to the Smart Object, because Distort, Perspective, and Warp don't work. And those are the ones we want to learn. 
So remembering how to convert it from a Smart Object back to regular layer, is right click 'Logo', and say, I would like you to be a 'Rasterized Layer'. Nothing much changes except that little icon's gone, and magically, 'Edit', 'Transform', these things appear. Now I never use Skew, I'll save you the trouble of testing it because it just does this. I'm not sure when you'd use that, or at least I don't use it, so I'm going to hit 'Esc'. Is the kind of "I didn't mean it" button, 'Esc' on my keyboard. 
The ones that I do use, we're going to use say, Distort first, I love this one. It's really good for mocking up, like signs that you've made on to real objects. So this one here, I'm just going to, kind of clicking anywhere about the center, moving it down here. And what you do is grab the corners, and it's kind of like in this weird flat plane that you can start manipulating. Now it's not going to match the background automatically. So there's a lot of just, you having a look. I'm doing it right now by-- kind of got, I don't know why I close one eye when I'm doing it. It seems to help with my perspective. Does that look like it's on the ground? Ah, that's good enough. When I'm ready, hit 'Enter'. You could fake a sign for a billboard, or say you've mocked up a cover of a magazine, you can have a picture of a magazine. Bring in your, say InDesign cover ideas, and mock it up using that Distort. 
Now the next one I want is, I'm going to duplicate Logo again. And we look at Warp, right clicking it, 'Duplicate Layer'. 'Logo 3'. Remember, right click it, and say you have to be a Rasterized Layer; sorry, buddy. I'll move it down to kind of roughly where I want it. I'm going to get it down to a rough size, I'm using 'Edit', 'Transform', 'Scale'. Now we're going to use the 'Edit', 'Transform', and we're going to use this one called 'Warp'. I'm going to zoom in a bit, and show you how it works. It's a little weird. Grab one of the corners, click, hold, and just give it a wiggle. Kind of turns it more like fabric, whereas the last one made it like a block. Made it like a sheet that you could kind of manipulate. 
This one here is a lot more-- Warp here is a lot more kind of elastic. It's more like a sheet of paper, so I can move it around. So there's two parts to it, there's these corners, they're called Anchor Points. So the edge of this image has to go to that Anchor Point wherever it is. These other little things here called handles are the way that the line gets influenced. You can see, nothing actually has to pass through this little black dot but it's kind of like gravity, kind of like distorts the line before it hits the Anchor Point. So just know, every Anchor Point here has two handles. There's a top one, and the bottom one. 
Now it's the same principle again. There's a lot of just kind of like dragging it around, saying okay, I feel like that's the bottom. Trying to get the perspective lining with the bottom of that shoe there. And then, see these two little handles here. I'm just trying to disorder it to make it feel like it was following the kind of path. I have it up a little bit there. It's up with these little wavy lines to follow, but same with this one here. You can see, it kind of doubled back on itself, so I want it about there, but then I have to adjust these lines. It's a lot of messing around. Just getting a feel for it, this bottom one here. 
It's a little hard to see some of these dots. I shouldn't have picked a stripy shoe. If you're practicing with me, you're cursing the stripy shoe. You're probably cursing the shoe theme throughout this whole course. I hope you're not getting too bored of it but I went with a shoe theme. So what am I doing now? I'm just kind of messing around, trying to get it to flow. Can you see, the lines in the center here, kind of bit weird. You can actually just click and drag these as well, any of these points in here, because we kind of fixed the outside. 
Now we just need to kind of drag the inside and make it feel like it was part of it. Good. It's okay. All right, I'm going to stop there, because you're just watching me do this. I could be at it for a while, hit 'Return' when you're ready. Zoom out, and you've got something kind of bent around the shape. I haven't done a great job. One of the things that make it super obvious is that the colors are just super strong and don't have any of this kind of-- they're not interacting with the background very much. 
So we've looked at this before, remember, Blending Modes? So on my logo 3, it's this layer here, turn the Eyeball on and off. Up where it says Normal, remember we've played around with a few of these. We're going to look at Multiply, and that kind of works. It's kind of cool, maybe a bit strong. You just work your way through all these options to find one that you feel works good with your shoe and your image, and your background color. I was playing around with this. What looked good? Linear Light, I think it did. Kind of like the Linear Light, changed the color quite a bit of my graphic, so maybe that's not what I want. Maybe that's a bit closer, and I really want to go back and fix this because it doesn't look very realistic. 
So I hope you got an understanding of some of those Transform Tools. I don't use them all. Some of them are just a bit weird, like Perspective, just use Distort. Quicker and easier, in my opinion. Last little things I'll throw in at the end here are Image, and sometimes Image Rotation, instead of doing it per layer you can do the whole thing. Remember, we looked at rotating it clockwise, just the particular layer. This does the whole graphic, same with flipping it. So if you want to flip this across the whole thing, rather than just a particular layer. Plus it was rotating there, 'Image'. Image Rotation, and there's a few little things in there to work with. That's where they're hiding. All right, I will see you in the next video.