its been bothering me for a while...

how does people magazine or other mags get their logo behind the head of a celeb in a picture?

i get that if the celeb is, say, standing in front of a white background, they just call up the logo in photoshop and put in in a layer behind the picture of the celeb, but if its a real photo with a real background then i dont get how this is done.

enlighten me, please.

Kinda like how you could physically cut out a picture of a person in a mag with scissors so it's just the person with no background at all.

Or you could just erase the background rather than cut the subject out.

I dunno about the shit like that, but here's an example.

Here's an example:
http://graphicssoft.about.com/od/photoshop/l/blrbps_1jet.htm
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im talking about more like how do they do this:

http://i.a.cnn.net/cnn/2006/US/04/09/time.cover/story.time.cover.jpg

the lockers in the background arent photoshopped in, so how do you keep the lockers there and also add the time logo so its behind the cover model's head?

the hell of it is i know there is a really simple answer that i just havent thought of yet.

have 3 layers.. top layer would be the girl cut out with no backgroud, second layer would be the girl, and the third layer would be the whole picture of the girl with the locker background

and yeah that makes ALOT of sense, you are a genius. thanks :-)

second layer would be the logo.. :)

genius... maybe on a good day, but ordinarily i am a fiddler...

fiddler= person who is obsessed with tinkering..lol

>have 3 layers.. top layer would be the girl cut out with no
>backgroud, second layer would be the girl, and the third layer
>would be the whole picture of the girl with the locker
>background

you take the original photo and make a new file with a clipping path around the part you want to show up in front of the logo. (i.e. in your example you don't need to draw a clipping path around the entire girl, just around her head.)

Then in Quark or indesign or whatever you first place the original photo, then the logo, then the clipping path file on top. the clipping path file only needs to be her head plus a little extra around the sides. then align that file perfectly on top of the original photo when you bring them into your layout (or Photoshop) file.

the magazine design business?

and how long would you think top professionals take to do all of that (the clipping, the adding of the logo, the making sure its ready to print)?

like mere minutes or a good amount of time?

Putting the layers together doesn't take much time at all. But what can take a while is silo'ing the part of the photo that's meant to go in front of the logo. It's all about how complex the edge of the silo is. If it's someone's wavy, frizzy hair, that shit is impossible. If it's a clean, close crop hair cut with a clean line around it, it's easy. As someone mentioned below, the more contrast between the background and the foreground, the easier your job is.

And yeah, I work in the industry. I work for a small publishing company in NYC that puts out specialty magazines you've never heard of.

but you can google to find a tutorials on selecting a subject. better yet, search for a tutorial on selecting hair. once you've sucessfully selected the subject and placed him/or her on their own layer, just place the logo on a layer underneath it.

You start off with the picture in two identical layers. On the top layer you can trace around the foreground image so the background is selected. After you have the background selected, you just erase everything in that layer. If you do it right, the erasing will leave what you want. You make a new transparent layer with your logo and put that layer in between the image layers.

I'm sure there are some shortcuts but I don't know them.





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Quark XPress (the most common print layout app) is a pain in general...

i don't use either one a lot but i do know that Quark is basically dead and InDesign's easier to use

the IT "consultants" at our office convinced management to stick with Quark. So when we did our big software upgrade, we went to Quark 6.5, not to indesign. I was so mad.

Some people have been saying Quark is better for publishing (books, magazines, large documents, etc), but I don't believe it.