Stennick Posted September 4, 2009 Share Posted September 4, 2009 So as some of you know a few weeks ago I picked up GIMP and started playing around with making some logos. Some have turned out pretty decent and those are the ones I've posted. However that being said my skills are VERY limited. I can cut, I can find graphics, I can do fonts, but thats about as far as it goes. My strategy for logo making consists of finding two colors I feel blend well for the logo. Then I find a logo, I cut from the logo what I want to cut from the logo. Then I paste the logo onto the blended background and add some font and there ya go. I hit Kam up and was going to talk about it in there but we both kinda figured go ahead and make it a thread. So I guess my biggest question right now is two things. I know HOW to do paths but I can't find my option to add the text into the path thus I can't bend and distort text. The second question would be how do I blend colors IN the text. there is an NWF logo with the flag in the text, the Ignite logo has a blended fiery background. So we'll start with those. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kamchatka Posted September 4, 2009 Share Posted September 4, 2009 Ah yes welcome to the intricate land of GIMP. For those unaware, GIMP is a free open source graphics program that can be downloaded here Now on to a few tips.. Bending and Distorting Text This is one of the few points where GIMP does not match up to Photoshop. You ways to do so in GIMP are limited to Filters > Distort > Curve Bend and so forth. These will suffice for things like making a flag rippled but when it comes to the more tricky world of typography and text bending it falls short. I choose to use Photoshop to do the text bending as it allows you to see in real time what the outcome is like. There may however be an add-on for GIMP that improves its distortion ability, I admit I have not searched. (EDIT: According to the gimp development notes this may be solved by the 2.8 release) Objects/Colours in Text Ah now this is one of the keys to logo building with GIMP, its all about selecting the boundary of the text. To do so, right click on the text's layer in the layer window and then select 'Alpha to Selection' this will give you the boundary of the text, you are now free to use that boundary to cut out another object (A flag for example) or to use the 'Blend/Gradient Tool' (To give the fiery background effect). This also leads onto the next key to logo building. Boundaries If you study the original C-verse logos a lot of them employ heavy white boundaries around their text and graphics, or other colour boundaries. Learning to create this effect therefore is essential to making C-verse logos, and very very simple to do. After using the Alpha to Selection method explained in the previous section to get the boudary, next create a new layer and then click >Select >Grow and then choose the amount of pixels you want the boundary to be. Then select the paint bucket tool and fill the selection with white. Make the boundary layer lower than the graphic layer and hey presto youve got a beautiful white boundary In the C-verse logos most of the boundaries are either 1 or 1.5 in pixel size, but it is highly recommendable to be building your logos in a larger size than the final 150x150 in order to achieve more detail. My preference is 300x300. Therefore I choose to grow the boundary by 2 or 3 pixels respective of how detailed/bold I want the graphic to be. This however leads us onto the only other problem I have found with GIMP. GIMP is terrible at reducing image size. When it attempts to do it, you often lose a lot of quality in the image. I therefore choose to use Photoshop to reduce the size of the image after building it in GIMP. --- Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Stennick Posted September 4, 2009 Author Share Posted September 4, 2009 So then you use GIMP and PS side by side in a lot cases then huh? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kamchatka Posted September 4, 2009 Share Posted September 4, 2009 So then you use GIMP and PS side by side in a lot cases then huh? Its not essential but I have found that it has vastly improved things for me. Photoshop is not hard to come by on the internet of course. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Stennick Posted September 5, 2009 Author Share Posted September 5, 2009 Yeah I have both although PS seems a lot harder to get the hang of IMO. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
crayon Posted September 5, 2009 Share Posted September 5, 2009 Yeah, while I think both apps are as good (or bad) as the person using them, I would urge you to do a google for photoshop tutorials to practice up on PS, since you've got it on hand. The few times I've had to use GIMP it's seemed pretty convoluted for doing basic things. For example, just looking at Kamchatka's explanation of doing boundries in GIMP; in PS you just double-click on your layer to bring up the layer styles box, and do a checkbox on "Stroke" to get an outline around your logo. In the C-verse logos most of the boundaries are either 1 or 1.5 in pixel size, but it is highly recommendable to be building your logos in a larger size than the final 150x150 in order to achieve more detail. My preference is 300x300. Interesting that you make your logos at a larger size though Kam, for me, I always work in the given 150x150 size expressly because of the issues that come about with re-sizing (I like to know what the final product is going to look like). Although, if I ever needed to do them at a larger size for diaries I would be throughly screwed Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
paulskln Posted September 5, 2009 Share Posted September 5, 2009 i want to resize a logo from 100x100 to 150x150.how do i do this using gimp without distorting/blurring the image. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Stennick Posted September 5, 2009 Author Share Posted September 5, 2009 You can't hardly DEcrease size in GIMP without blurring I would imagine it next to impossible to INcrease size without blurring. Your best best is redoing the image best you can. I think I'm going to work on my PS skills this weekend. I've noticed with GIMP its a lot of "do this, then this, then this, then that and THEN you get to do what you want". Just the tutorials I'm looking at it seems like a lot of steps to do simple things like distort text. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kamchatka Posted September 5, 2009 Share Posted September 5, 2009 i want to resize a logo from 100x100 to 150x150.how do i do this using gimp without distorting/blurring the image. Increasing the size of an image will inevitably cause blurring unfortunately. Interesting that you make your logos at a larger size though Kam, for me, I always work in the given 150x150 size expressly because of the issues that come about with re-sizing (I like to know what the final product is going to look like). Although, if I ever needed to do them at a larger size for diaries I would be throughly screwed Ive always worked in a higher resolution with any graphic work, 300x300 works well enough for me as I can still see smaller details that sometimes are more implied in the final product, for example this logo: http://i559.photobucket.com/albums/ss39/Kamchatka863/EMPIRE.jpg Also working in 300x300 means that I can view it in 50% and I can see the finished product. (Reducing size in Photoshop will mean no loss of data) The final benefit is of course future uses. You can always go down in size but never up so bigger is safer. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
crayon Posted September 5, 2009 Share Posted September 5, 2009 True, never thought about zooming out to get a preview of the final product. Great tip Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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