clean up a low-resolution logo

using: photoshop illustrator

It's common that the logo wthe logo supplied for a design job is from a web page or low resolution. Sometimes the company no longer have access to high resolution or vector versions of their logo. Sometimes it's simply a matter of expedience - the quality logo won;t arrive until Monday but the job must be completed over the weekend.

However it comes about, the 'website' logo just isn't good enough.

Well unfortunately there's no simple panacea for this probem, but there are ways to improve a poor logo, and that's the topic of this tutorial.

Without the need to take screenshots, performing the task in this tutorial takes around 4-6 minutes.

NOTE: there is a PDF download of this tutorial,with his-res images, available for members.

This is the logo we're going to attempt to revive. Don't worry, I made it up a few minutes ago in Illustrator, choosing random colors and a random font for the made-up design.( PLEASE don't criticize the design, it was a 2 minute quick job.)

The image on the left looks ok, because you're viewing it on a web page at its original size. But if we zoom in (above right) we can see what it would look like printed or used in any other format.

First step is to RESAMPLE the image up to something quite large. In this case we increase the DPI to 600, which takes it out to 12 megabytes. See from the zoom on the right that although some of the pixelation is gobe, the image is still not acceptable.

Using LEVELS, reduce the image to its primary colors by dragging the end handles to the middle. You'll have to experiment to get th eright balance between lightness and darkness, which will affect the edges of the elements. There are two separate colors here - the text purple and the background orange. Because the orange is basically a square, we don't need to preserve that at all. It's the text we want.

Next, have a look at the individual CHANNELS to see which one shows up the text without the background. DUPLICATE this CHANNEL - in this case the GREEN CHANNEL.

This little two-step will smooth out the jaggy edges of the text and may not always be necessary. First apply a GAUSSIAN BLUR to the text in the GREEN COPY Channel, taking care not to destroy its integrity, but smooth out the rough edges. Then use LEVELS again to drag the end handles towards the center and sharpen up that edge.

RESAMPLE the image back to about 300 dpi - or to the finished size that you require. Then LOAD the CHANNEL that you made by duplicating the best contrasting color CHANNEL (in this case the GREEN COPY).

Using the new selection, make a LAYER out of the 'new' text shape (COPY/PASTE) and turn off the background image. SAVE the image in Photoshop's own format (.PSD) to retain the layers and extra channels. Then open the original file again to sample the colors.

NOTE: if you know the PMS colors that the logo is supposed to use, now's the time to set them up, but in the absense of any other imformation, sampling the RGB colors from the web image is the best you can do.

With the LAYER TRANSPARENCY locked, color the text in the color sampled from the original. Switch off that new layer and make a SELECTION of the square (diamond) behind the text. Make a new layer and color that in the same way as the text (sampling from the original.

That's the logo in a higher resolution form. It's not perfect, but the only way to make it perfect is to re-draw it in a vector program. (There will be a tutorial in the future on how to do that).

If you want to clean up the edged of this text, an optional extra follows.

CTRL/CMMD-CLICK on the text layer's icon to select the text layer. In the PATHS panel, turn the selection into paths using a tolerance of about 2 pixels (experiment!). Then with the DIRECT SELECTION tool in the toolbar (the white one) you are able to manipulate the paths of the text and reshape them.

Alternatively you can PLACE the text layer into ILLUSTRATOR and use LIVE TRACE to turn it into paths.

This is the preferable option if the job has to be right, and as I stated there will be a tutorial that expands on this in the future.

For now, we have a much better logo than the web image to put into our print design.

The image used in this tutorial is available for Members to download.

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