Create Your Own Logo Wallpaper

YOUR WALLPAPER, OR SCREEN BACKGROUND, is a very personal thing. It’s easy enough to place just about any image you want on your desktop with a click of the right mouse button, but you almost immediately get into problems with aspect ratios and resolution—an image that’s too small looks terrible when stretched across your monitor.

So, why not make your own? There are lots of reasons why you should, from a cell phone shot being easily high enough resolution and likely the right aspect ratio, to the availability of the stunning photography Microsoft provides in its background packs (we like Reflections and Aurora Borealis). An image that is exactly the pixel dimensions of your monitor is always going to look sharper than one that’s had to be altered in some way, and that’s what a bespoke wallpaper offers.

If you do decide to make your own, why not brand your PC with some component logos? A lot of our PCs are bespoke designs themselves, after all. In anticipation of an AMD-powered monster emerging from Zak’s smoking lab, we did exactly that. 1 LOCATE A LOGO First, catch your logo. We were lucky enough to score a Ryzen logo as a vector EPS file, which meant we could rasterize it in Photoshop to whatever size we wanted. So we made it 50 x 30cm at 300dpi—a preposterously large size for something that’s going to be displayed on a 1440p screen, or a 4K one at a push. The logo touched the edges of the canvas, so we used “Image > Canvas Size” to expand it to 70 x 50cm at 300dpi—over 8,200 pixels across. The logo is floating freely on its own layer, so we don’t need to extract it—you’ll want to do this if your logo is a .jpg or .png file, in order to fill in behind it. Cut around the logo with one of the marquee tools, or use one of the quick selection tools, then use “Layer > New > Layer Via Copy” to extract it. 2 ADD SOME LIGHT We’re seeing AMD in a new light since the launch of Ryzen, so let’s cast some new light on the logo [groan!— Ed.]. Photoshop’s Lighting Effects filter was completely rebuilt for the CS6 release in 2012, so it’s one of the newer filters in the application’s armory. Lighting Effects enables you to place a directional light on your image, lightening and darkening it to reflect the beam. Select the layer with your logo on it, then head to “Filter > Render > Lighting Effects” to open the filter window [ Image A]. Mess about with it until you get something pleasing. We’ve got a spotlight coming in from the right, with its beam constrained so it lights up the left side of the logo’s swirl. 3 MAKE IT STAND OUT The black background behind the logo is just a simple layer filled with black using the Bucket tool— nothing complicated there. Against the black, however, the lettering of the Ryzen logo disappears somewhat, so we’re going to use the Magic Wand to select the text, and copy it to a new layer, as detailed earlier. Hide the black layer by removing the eye icon next to it in the Layers palette, to make things easier if you’ve got a similar black-on-black scenario. To make the lettering stand out, we’re going to use some Layer Styles. Double-click the layer to bring up

the Layer Styles palette, and add an outer glow and gradient overlay to get the effect we have [ Image B]. Or play around with what looks good on your image. 4 ADJUST THE ANGLE We merged the lettering back into the logo layer by selecting the two layers in the Layers palette and using “Layer > Merge Layers.” Keeping this newly created layer selected, we headed to the terrifying “3D” menu, and created a postcard using “3D > New Mesh From Layer > Postcard.” A postcard is the simplest 3D mesh Photoshop can produce—it’s nothing more than a flat plane, which can have 3D properties attached to it. We’re not going to do anything too involved here, just adjust the angle at which the logo sits relative to the viewer, so that’s the perfect kind of layer for our needs. Photoshop asks whether you want to change to the 3D workspace from whatever you’re currently using—it’s worth doing so, just to get a feel for what it’s like, but remember to change back once you’ve finished using the “Windows, Workspace” dropdown at the top-right of the interface. 5 USE THE 3D WORKSPACE If you’re not used to 3D applications, Photoshop’s 3D workspace can be a little daunting. You have the three axes around which to move your layer, shown by the small cube with three arrows coming off it in the center, and your cursor changes as it moves across the screen, because it does different things depending on where it’s placed. One moment it may be rotating your layer, while a move to the left can change it to one that moves it. The lighting you set up earlier is baked into the layer, and doesn’t change as you rotate it around. We simply push the logo around its X axis, so it appears to lean back, then move it back into the center of the composition. A Z-axis rotation puts it at a jaunty angle [ Image C], and a right-click on the Layer 3 Mesh in the 2D palette brings up a menu from which we select “Rasterize 3D Layer.” And the 3D experiment is over. 6 FINISHING TOUCHES Back in familiar 2D Photoshop, we tell the Crop tool to trim our image to the precise pixel dimensions by inputting them in the fields at the top-left of the interface [ Image D]. Drag a box on your composition, and you’ll see that it’s locked to the correct aspect ratio. Click the checkmark once you’re happy, and your image is cropped and resized to whatever dimensions you entered. We also decided to spruce up the background a touch with a free texture from http://deviantart.com, layered over the black layer, with a low opacity, and also added a slight gradient to the black layer, to give our final image just a touch more pop [ Image E].