Brandmark Tutorial

On a moviesite, my eye felt (surprisingly) on this poster for an new movie: "This film is not yet rated".

I thought: "Nice Photoshop. Let's try to do this myself."

And so I did. This is what I came up with:

Click to enlarge

Of course, I wrote a "making of". Read on:

The working process consists of three phases: first we make the mark, then the smoke and then we throw everything together and apply the special effects.

Start the Photoshopmachine!

A: The Mark.

1. Open a new file, size 250 x 130, on a transparent background.

Fill ("G") the area with a red color (I used A11D21).

2. Ctrl-A to select all, then click select>modify>contract and set this to 10 pixels. Now you have a smaller selection, hit "delete" so you have a red 10-pixel border.

3. In the same red color, type your text. I wrote PHOTO-SHOP with this font settings:font: Arial Black

size: 60
horizontal spacing: -50
vertical spacing: 50

4. In the main menu, choose layer>merge visible to combine the border and the text into one, editable layer.

B: The Smoke.

1. Leave the mark-file open and open another one, dimensions 1000 x 1000. Press "D" to reset the foreground and background colors to black and white.

2. Apply the filter>render>clouds to generate some clouds (if you don't like the random result, press ctrl-F to apply the filter again and get another one).

3. Now we have white clouds on a black background; we want to get rid of these black areas. Therefore, click select>color range in the main menu. When you get the settings popup, click on a black area with the eyedropper and set the fuzziness to 141.

4. Go in Quick Mask-mode ("Q").

Apply the filter>blur>Gaussian blur with value 5,0. Return to normal mode and hit delete. Ctrl-D to deselect. If everything went fine, you should now have white clouds only.

C. The Assembling.

1. Open your model picture.

2. Start by dragging the mark into the picture. Using ctrl-T or edit>transform>free transform and edit>transform>rotate to adjust the size and angle until it looks right to you.

3. At this moment, the brand is to straight, so it seems to float That's because it doesn't follow the curves of our model. Therefore, apply filter>distort>wave and fill in these values:

number of generators: 1
wavelength: 122 - 551
amplitude: 5 - 35
scale: 100% - 100%

(Other settings might work as well; you can experiment with the distort filters pinch and spherize too.)

4. Apply the filter>Gaussian blur> 1,5 and then set the blending mode to "color burn". Duplicate the layer, place it underneath the original mark-layer, and apply filter>blur>Gaussian blur> 10 on it (blending mode of this layer copy is still set to color burn).

This should be enough for the mark. On to the smoke …

5. Throw in the smoke-layer (drag from the apart Photoshop-file). Adjust the size with the free transform tool (ctrl-T) and then apply a layer mask.

As you know, brushing with black in a layer mask erases, white recalls. Now brush the edges away with a soft brush and a low opacity (about 20%), as well as unnecessary (or unreal looking) parts.

6. Set the blending mode of the smoke layer to "screen".

7. Finishing touch: on a new layer, paint some white lines with a soft brush from the border to the smoke and then apply a gaussian blur (5) on this layer. Again, set the blending mode to screen.

This is my finished result:

Click to enlarge