Best way to Remove White Background from Logo?

[Eric Jones]

If your logo is just b&w you can just set the logo’s blending mode to multiply and and the white will drop out… but you might have already known that? otherwise all I know to do is to key it out with one of the keying filters in AE, it should key out easily if your white is even.

ejunyor

[Kevin Camp]

is the logo animated? if not, i would use photoshop… it sounds like there are some jpeg like artifacts around the edges, and if the colors you are trying to keep are close to white, you will have problems. photoshop has better selective blurring tools to help smooth those out.

if you don’t have photosop, the logo is animated or you just like to work in ae. you might try looking at the individual channels (r, g, or b) with the show channel selector in the preview window (colored circles button). if one looks better than the others, better contrast or less noise, then you could try and use that channel to create a matte.

duplicate the logo layer and use the channel combiner effect on the duplicate to make that color channel luminance only. add a levels adjustment to make dark areas black and the light areas white (white will be opaque, black transparent in the next step). set the original logo layer to use the duplicate as a track matte. if you get a white fringe, precomp those two layers and then add remove color mattting, with the color set to white.

Kevin Camp
Designer – KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Darby Edelen]

My recommendation would be to create a matte from your Logo. Duplicate the layer, add a Color Correction>Tint effect to the duplicate with the default settings (making it B&W), add a Color Correction>Levels effect and increase the black input to a very high level (so that the parts of your logo you want to keep are entirely black and the parts that you don’t are white), add a Channel>Invert effect to the RGB channels to make the blacks white and the whites black, then set the original lower layer to use the upper layer (the matte you just made) as a luma matte.

Note that if there is a drop shadow involved here you can try to make those areas gray in the matte by tweaking your levels effect to maintain some opacity in the shadows.

After this is done you might find that Channels>Remove Color Matting set to White might help on the original layer, or a Matte>Simple Choker.

Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA