[Jeff Hinkle]

If you need to deliver an Illustrator file (.ai), why not just build the logo in Illustrator? That way the entire logo will be vector, which is generally what you want with a logo. I always build logos in Illustrator and place into Photoshop when needed.

[Jeff Hinkle]

Have you tried Composition>Save Frame As>Photoshop Layers instead of Save Frame As>File…? I just gave that a try on a few projects and they popped open with transparency built in.

[Jeff Hinkle]

Check your Channels palette and see if the alpha channel is in there. If it is, just Command-click its thumbnail to make a selection of it and then you can make a layer matte out of that. That should get you your transparency back.

[Jeff Hinkle]

“Doesn’t feel natural” how? The movement? The lighting? If you can post your shot someone will have a much better idea how to help you fix it.

[Jeff Hinkle]

Select your Zoom tool and check the control bar along the top of the screen. There should be a small checkbox labeled “Zoom All Windows.” Deselect that and you should go back to zooming the active window while the rest keep minding their own business. Zooming with the keyboard (command/control-plus and -minus) seems to ignore the setting as well.

[Jeff Hinkle]

Creating Motion Graphics by Chris and Trish Meyer gets my vote, hands down.

[Jeff Hinkle]

I’m guessing you’re on a Mac, since what you’re describing sounds like Exposé behavior (the Shift key makes it go in slo-mo). Go into your System Preferences, select Keyboard & Mouse, and under the Keyboard tab, make sure the checkbox that reads “Use all F1, F2, etc. keys as standard function keys” is selected. Then click Show All to return to System Preferences, go into Exposé and Spaces, and set Show Desktop to something other than F11. That should do the trick.

[Jeff Hinkle]

Looks like in your Character palette, your text height is set to 0%. So your text is there, it’s just really, really flat. Pop that back up to 100% and you should be all set.

[Jeff Hinkle]

With a similar background/foreground issue like this, I’d go in and do it by hand. Use the Pen tool to draw a mask around her body, just roughing in the hair (stay inside the contours of her hair). Command-click the thumbnail in the Paths palette to make a selection, then select your model layer in the Layers palette and click on the Add Layer Mask button. This will give you a transparency mask for your model. If the edges seem too sharp, you can do it again but contract the selection by 1 pixel and apply a 1-pixel feather before making the mask.

The hair’s not going to look too good, but we’ll get to that. Shift-click the mask in the Layers palette to turn it off, showing you the entire image, then go into your Channels palette, select your layer mask, and turn on its visibility. This will put an overlay color over your image, showing you where the image will be transparent and where it will be opaque. You might need to double-click the mask layer to change the overlay color if it’s too similar to your background.

Then, still in the mask channel, with a soft-edged brush, go in and start painting in the hair you just masked out. Use white to paint in visibility, black to paint in transparency. You can use a larger brush for the large areas, smaller (say, 2-pixel) for strands and flyaways. Having a pressure-sensitive tablet is a HUGE help in this. Setting opacity to be determined by pressure will give nice faded edges on those errant hairs. And don’t feel you have to be 100% exact with this. Get it close but you can give them a haircut with no one noticing. How long this takes depends on the model’s hairstyle, how frizzy her hair is, and how anal you want to be. Go back and hit the ends of the hair strands with a soft-edged black brush to kill any hard edges.

Once that’s done and you’re happy with the basic mask, duplicate your image layer and turn the mask back on (shift-click it in the Layers palette) and turn off the mask visibility in the Channels palette. Turn off your original layer so you can go back to it if you need. With the transparency on, add a layer below your model and fill it with white. You’ll probably see a lot of stray background colors in the hair you painted back in. Switch to the Clone Stamp tool, make sure you’re editing the image and not the mask, and sample colors from the hair and paint into the strands. This will blend in the natural hair colors, but you won’t see any of the overspill thanks to the layer mask. When you’re done, you should have a natural-looking isolated image.

[Jeff Hinkle]

In your Project Window, you should have a comp named the same as your Illustrator file (unless you renamed it, of course), and a folder named [COMPNAME] Layers. Open that folder and you should see all your layers from the Illustrator file. Right-click one, choose “Replace Footage > File…” and navigate to the new location of your Illustrator file. Make sure “Import As:” at the bottom of the window is set to “Footage.”

Once you’ve selected your AI file, you’ll get another dialog box. Under “Layer Options” select “Choose Layer” and from the pop-up select the layer with the same name as the one you originally selected in the Project Window. Hit OK and all the rest of your layers should magically relink and appear in your project.