A practical use of Photoshop for video professionals is to cut out a logo and create a glass bug.
For example, let’s say I want to cut out this film clapper to create a glass bug.
If you are on a Macintosh, you can use the keyboard shortcut command + shift 4 to select
an area to take a snapshot.
If you are running windows, press the print-screen screen and paste the image directly into Photoshop.
Open your image into Photoshop, and check to make sure the image mode is set to RGB.
If you are grabbing something from the web or Google images the mode may be set to index
color.
Crop the image to discard the areas that are not needed. To do this use crop tool or press
the C key to activate it. Press enter to crop the image after you’ve drawn your crop box.
Press Command Zero to enlarge the image to fit your screen.
Click on the magic eraser tool. The magic eraser tool will automatically erase the background
based on the color that you click on.
You can adjust the tolerance that affects the color range that will be removed and I’m
if going to set the tolerance to a fairly high value of 120.
In this case, I’m going to undo by pressing command Z to remove the blue color with my
new tolerance value and these white areas so they are transparent.
Notice the checkerboard pattern. This represents a transparent background which is sometimes
called an ‘alpha channel’.
After you’ve cut out your logo, double click on Layer 0 within the layers tab.
This brings forward the layer style dialog box.
Activate the bevel and emboss category. Drag the depth slider to a fairly high value and
drag the size value to a value between 1 and 3.
The last step is to remove the fill color by moving over to the layers tab and dragging
the fill slider to a value of 0.
For Final Cut Pro or Avid Media Composer users, save the image as a .png file type. The .png
file format will automatically embed this transparent background information into the
file.
You can now edit your glass bug into your favorite editing system. In this example,
I’ll edit this into Final Cut Pro.
Okay, I hope you enjoyed this tutorial. For more tips and tricks like this visit GeniusDV.com.
