Myerson Photo Blog

So you want your logo to appear spray painted on an urban background without the hassle of all that property destruction, huh? Here’s a simple way to get that freshly-tagged look and still stay out of lockup for the night.

First off, lets assemble some pieces. We’ll need a background image, our logo, and some assorted graffiti art. For the background image, I’ll be using this corrugated metal wall, available from iStockphoto:

The logo we’ll be using is this little number, a little vector art I created just for this occasion. You can use a vector illustration or raster art (provided it’s already big enough for your final output). I find that simpler, monochrome images work best, but you should experiment.

Lastly, I purchased a vector file from iStock as well to serve as additional image elements. Using a vector file is cool, because the art is extremely extensible - you can resize it infinitely without any kind of degradation, you can change colors, really do whatever you need, and it never loses quality. The vector I purchased was this one. Here are some of the pieces I extracted from that file (watermarked because this file is not freely available. Please purchase a copy for your own use).

Alright, let’s start. Open your background file, and paste in your logo. Rename that layer to “logo”. For the purposes of this tutorial, let’s assume that your pasted logo is a single color, as is the case with the house logo. Assuming that it is, the first thing you’ll want to do is open the “Blending Options” palette for that layer. In the section labeled “Blend if…”, move the black slider for “This Layer” over a few notches. That’ll turn off everything on the logo layer that is black; in other words, all visible pixels on that layer will become invisible.

Invisible logos are not that exciting, so lets give it some style. I gave the layer a layer style of “Gradient Overlay”. I picked a nice red gradient. If you want the actual colors in my gradient, they were [178,1,1] on the left side, [210,71,64] at about the midpoint, and [210,64,64] at the right end. You could use a solid color overlay as well, but I like the subtle variation that a gradient gives. After you’ve defined your gradient, set the style’s blend mode to “Multiply”.

Now we’re getting somewhere.

This is a good start, but we’re not done yet. Next, I duplicated the logo layer, and set the new layer’s gradient style blend mode to overlay instead of multiply. I brought back that layer’s opacity to about 50%. Next I put the two logo layers into their own folder set, and set that folder’s opacity to 75%.

If we were to stop here, we’d suffer from one of the biggest problems I often see in raster-vector composite work. Namely, that the vector elements look a whole lot like they were composited in to the image. The factor that is most responsible for this is the fact that the vector elements still have those perfectly crisp edges. I don’t care how skilled a stenciler you might have had tagging your logo onto innocent surfaces, there’s no way it’s coming out that clean. So we need to rough it up a little.

Step one is to use a layer mask. I started scratching up the hard edges using some grunge brushes. You could also do it with clever application of some native Photoshop filters, but I’ll save that for a future tutorial. You’ll want to be careful at this stage. Some logos will hold up to this kind of distressing better than others. Besides that, some clients may have very specific requirements as to what can and cannot be done with their logos. I’ve done work for clients who wouldn’t even allow the 3-degree rotation I applied to our little house icon.

The next stage of roughing it up is to use those vector spray paint splotches we licensed. Again, bring them into Photoshop as black pixels. Be sure to put the splotch layer into the same folder as the logo; that will ensure that the layer mask we created before applies to the paint splotches as well.

We’ll once again hide the black pixels and replace them with a gradient fill as we did for the logo. The way to do that, this time, is to right click on the logo layer (the first one, not the copy), and select “Copy Layer Style”. Then right click on the paint splotch layer and select “Paste Layer Style”. The specifics of where to put the splotches and how opaque to make this layer will depend greatly on your file. It’s easy to go overboard with paint splotches, so experiment and see what works best for you.

That’s all there is to it! Urban flair without any incriminating paint on your fingertips!