Turn Photos Into Logos with GIMP

[Music] this is Nick with logos by Nick comm and in today's tutorial I'll be demonstrating how you can take a photo and trace it into a logo using and this is something I originally did for a client of mine who wanted me to depict a zombies hands coming up from the ground and my approach to to creating that design was to simply take a photo of my own hand under appropriate lighting and then trace over with and then convert it to vectors in Inkscape and to show you what I mean here here's the photo I took right here if you'd like to follow along with this tutorial I'll put a link to this photo in the description of the video otherwise what you could do is just grab your phone take a picture of your own hand or take a picture of whatever you'd like really just make sure there's decent lighting and and then get it onto your computer and open it up with like you see here so let's go ahead and get started here the first thing I want to do is just strip away all of the color information so I'll go to colors saturation and I'm gonna bring that all the way down to zero to make that greyscale and go ahead and click OK and since I'm going to be tracing over the the shaded areas what I want to do is I want to accentuate those shadows a little more I want to bring them out a little more so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go to view I know actually colors curves and I'm gonna take this note over here in the bottom left and just slide that to the right a little bit and you're gonna notice the photo is shadows darkening a little bit now you don't want to go too much because you don't want to lose the definition between the hand and the wall there the shadow on the wall you want to be able to see the edges of the entire subject that you'll be tracing so it's important to keep that in mind I'm gonna keep that right about there and I'm gonna go ahead and click OK and what I'm gonna do now is I'm going to add a new layer on top of this and then we're gonna start tracing so I'm gonna click this button down here that says create a new layer and add it to the image it's going to leave all of the default settings here just to double-check make sure we have transparency go ahead and click OK and I'm going to take the opacity of that layer and bring that down to like 30 somewhere in the 30s like that and I'm gonna take the foreground color and I'm gonna change that to red and I'm going to grab a brush over here I'm gonna use this solid fill brush right here hardness number two 100 and I'm gonna bring the size of this brush down and I'm gonna zoom in over the bottom left hand area over here I'm gonna hold control and roll the mouse wheel and if you notice the size of the brush here you can use the bracket keys left and right to increase the size and decrease decide I'm gonna make this a little bit bigger like that I'm using the right bracket key to do that and I'm just gonna go ahead and start tracing over it I'm gonna bring the opacity of that layer down a little more I don't like I like to be able to see more of a subject to the line that I'm creating I'm gonna go ahead and create so trace over the edge there if you uh if you don't like how one of the lines came out you could hit ctrl Z to undo it instead of going to edit and undo I just noted it's it's a lot easier to use the keyboard shortcuts I'm gonna go through and trace it don't worry about it being too perfect it doesn't have to be like well like fitting to every single crease and edge if you notice here the style that I'm using for this design is like a very whimsical hand-drawn sort of style so don't worry too much about it being exactly precise so what I'm gonna do is I'm just gonna trace over the rest of this here and then I will catch up with you when I'm done okay so as you can see I finished tracing the outline of the hand one thing I forgot to point out is that if you'd like to navigate around the canvas if you don't already know you just press down the mouse-wheel and move the mouse and that helps you navigate around a lot and the easiest way to zoom in zoom in and out it should just hold control and roll up and down the mouse wheel like that so the next step is I'm gonna make this brush a little smaller actually a lot smaller I'm gonna use the left bracket keys I'm gonna bring that down a lot like that and I'm gonna start tracing over the shadows here roughly and this is a little tricky to do because you're never gonna get it exactly precise but that's okay but it's because it doesn't have to be precise in order for it to rocket for it to look well so we're gonna go ahead and trace over this area right here do something like that and you may have to add your own lines in there let me bring the opacity of that up a little bit so I can see that better you may have to add your own areas in there where you think it should be it's very intuitive what to do here you should be able to just you know get a good sense of where these lines should go like this one here around the fingernail add some more shading over here and again it doesn't look like much just yet but once we do this to the entire image and then fill it in you'll notice it starts to all come together in it it really does look like a like a zombie and so what I'm gonna do is I'm just gonna go through and fill this all in real quick and then I'll catch up with you and I'm done you okay so I finished tracing over the shadow areas of the hands so the next step would be to actually fill in those areas and there's what is this several different ways you can do that for one what you would where you would naturally think to do is should just start painting it in with the brush like that but that takes a while to do that so what I like to do is use the bucket fill tool but before I do that I just want to do something real quick I want to add a new layer here and I want to fill it with white go ahead and click OK and I want to bring that down beneath the top layer there and I want to click on that top layer and bring the opacity up a little bit it just helps us to it just helps to see what we're filling in a little better as opposed to when we have it up against the hand photo so what I'm gonna do is I'm going to grab the the bucket fill tool and I'm gonna zoom in on this area right here I'm just gonna click in there to fill that in and if you notice when I clicked it leaves a little bit of these it leaves some pixels around the edges on fills so I'm just gonna click it again and that should fill it in even more and I'm just gonna go through and fill in the rest of these areas here if it leaves out little areas like that don't worry about it we're gonna go back with the brush in just a minute and fill the rest of that all in okay so now that that's all filled in what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna grab the brush and I'm gonna go back through these little areas here that may have been left out and I'm just going to fill them in manually you just go ahead and fill in those blank areas and then we'll move on to the next step okay so once we've done that we are finished with our hand tracing so the next step would be to turn off the visibility of the white layer there and then turn off the visibility of the hand photo layer and take the opacity of the top layer here and just bring that all the way up and what we want to do is convert this to black from red to black so I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go to colors colors and then threshold and you can take this arrow and bring this to the left and take this arrow over here and bring that to the left as well and then I shouldn't make it all black like that and click OK and we want a black with the transparent background and everything just like that once we've done that it's now time to take this tracing and make a logo out of it like you see here on this shirt so to do that what I'm going to do is I'm going to open a new document I'll go to file new and I want to size this document at 1280 by 1280 I want to come down here to Advanced Options and I want to fill it with transparency and go ahead and click OK and I'm just gonna hold ctrl and roll down the mouse-wheel a little bit to zoom out I want to be able to see the entire canvas there I'm gonna add some guides going on the canvas so I'm gonna go to image guides new guide by percent and I'm going to make this one horizontal at 50% then I'll add another one vertically I'll go to image guides new guide by percent and I will add a vertical guide in there and go ahead and click OK and just to make sure you come down here to image make sure you have a actually no view make sure you have got a snap to guides selected it shouldn't be selected by default but just double check to make sure and once we've done that I'm gonna change the foreground color to black menu keeps popping up on the wrong menu on the wrong monitor click OK I'm gonna grab the circles and ellipses tool and I'm gonna bring the cursor over here to this intersecting area of the guides where the center of the page is and I'm going to click and drag and then hold ctrl and so it makes a perfectly round circle in the center of the page and I'm gonna make this circle about maybe 2/3 the size of the page right there like that I'm gonna go to edit fill with foreground color and then go to select none and then take the opacity of this layer and bring it about in half like that and we're gonna come back over here to our hand tracing and I'm going to go to edit copy visible come back over here to the circle and then go to edit paste as new layer I'm gonna grab the move tool and I'm gonna grab this hand and position it right over the right over the circle right about where we want to place it and we want the top fingers to be sticking out of the circles a little bit as you see here it sticks out of a circle a little bit I want to do the same thing just to add a nice little design touch right about there is good what we want to do now is delete the portion of the hand that's sticking out of the bottom of the circle so to do that I'm going to right click on the background layer and go to alpha to selection and then I'm going to click on the pasted layer up here and I'm going to add to this circle selection by grabbing the free select tool and I'm gonna hold shift on the keyboard and then just click and drag a selection going around the top of those fingers over there and then back into the circle and then back to the starting point and let go and then press ENTER on the keyboard and it'll create a selection it'll add that selection to our current selection and what we could do now is go to select invert and press Delete on the keyboard to get rid of that protruding area or if you're using a Mac you can go to just edit clear and once we've done that we can go to select none and what I will do now is I want to erase the area from the inside of the hand of that light circle the the lighter circle back there so I'm gonna activate that background layer I'm gonna grab the eraser tool I'm gonna zoom in on the area right here I want to make the brush a little bigger yeah that's too small and use the bracket keys to make that bigger and I'm going to go through and erase or maybe not that big I'm going to go through and erase the portion of the circle that's sitting within the hand there just like that so just go through and erase all of that oops and then I will catch up with you when I'm done okay so now that we've done that we could take the opacity of that layer and bring it all the way up and you can see we kind of have our logo set but if you want to add this white outline layer to the outside of it I'll show you how to do that next otherwise this right here could work pretty well as a logo by itself it's got the negative space in there and whatever background you place it on will show through there so let me just show you how to add that white outline in case you'd like to do that as well what I'm gonna do now is I'm gonna create a new layer I'm gonna fill it with transparency go ahead and click OK and I'm gonna bring it to the very bottom I want this to be the bottom layer and I'm gonna go back to the circles and ellipses tool bring the cursor back to the center of the page click and drag and then hold shift and ctrl to bring the circle out to here we're gonna make this circle a little bit bigger than the previous circle right about there and we want to fill this in with white so what I'm gonna do is since we already have white set as our background color I'm gonna go to edit fill with background color and that's gonna fill that in with white and we're gonna select none now what we have to do now is add a little bit of an outline going around the fingers as well otherwise it doesn't look right so to do that I'm going to click on the top layer up here the hand layer right click that and go to alpha to selection then go to select grow if I could find it there it is I'm going to choose I'm gonna grow this by about 20 and see how that looks I'll click OK we want the thickness to be consistent with the thickness of the white border there and I think 20 relative to this design anyway looks pretty good so once we've done that we could fill that in with white as well I'm gonna go to edit actually no we got to create a new layer first let's create a new layer transparency click OK bring this beneath the pasted layer so it's gonna be the second layer down and then go to edit fill with background color and then select none and what you want to do now is just grab the paintbrush flip around the foreground and the background color so that you have white is the foreground color and then just zoom in here and just make sure you have whatever blank space is there filled in with white we want to make sure it's all filled in it looks like everything filled in there so we're good yours may be different when I was making when I was planning out the tutorial line there was a lot of blank space in there so I had to go and fill that in manually but right here this looks pretty good what we could do now is we have to delete this area of the white outline because it doesn't look right I think that looks a little too busy like that so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna right click on this layer and I'm gonna go to add layer mask and I'm gonna choose black full transparency and go ahead and click Add and what that's gonna do is it's gonna completely erase everything we just made on that layer and wherever we paint it in with white it'll show through so I'm gonna do is I'm going to zoom back in over here using the white paintbrush still I'm sure to go ahead and fill it in in only only in the areas where we want it which is these fingers that are protruding from the logo here there anything over here yeah a little bit and that's perfect right there what we could do now is right click on that layer and go to apply layer mask and that will finalize that and with that we are finished we have created our logo what you can do now is export this as a dot PNG file and it'll have a transparent background and you could use it however you'd like so if you have any questions let me know and as always thanks for watching [Music]

Channel: Logos By Nick

Views: 2,121,910

Keywords: gimp, gimp tutorial, turn photos into logos, gimp photo logos, logos by nick, logosbynick, nick saporito

Id: Yce2ZvGeanY

Length: 15min 27sec (927 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 05 2019