DamnedRegistrations

As per request, here's a Photoshop tip for noise removal that I find very useful. Before After I would recommend doing the following as it does a great job at removing color noise, especially when noise removal itself doesn't do the job good enough. 1. Before even starting your pen tool selection, go to "Filter->Blur->Surface Blur..." 2. Set the radius to 3 levels then adjust the threshhold depending on amount of color noise on the cover you're working with. Try not to overdo it or it can smudge. Having some noise and grain isn't really a big deal at all. If you have already either pen cut your wheel or are cleaning a completed wheel, then do the following. I would recommend not doing this with wheels which have thick black borders though as it creates transparent pixels for some reason: 1. Hit ctrl+J on keyboard or go to layers panel, right click the main logo layer and do a duplicate layer 2. With the duplicate layer active, apply the necessary surface blur 3. Now go to layers panel and make sure the main wheel layer beneath is active 4. Hold down ctrl on keyboard and left click on this main layer thumbnail in layers panel to make a selection 5. Make the duplicate layer that you applied the surface blur to active using layer panel again 6. With any selection tool, right click anywhere on logo and select "Layer via cut" 7. Delete the two layers beneath your new layer as they are no longer required If the surface blur or noise removal methods don't work good enough, you can simply use the blur tool while zoomed. This usually works best with gradients.

If you either can't afford Photoshop or are having problems getting it through "other means", then use GIMP. It's free of course. As long as it has some form of pen tool so you can cleanly cut out logos, then it should be just fine and I believe it does. I have no idea about paint.net but I think it's much more basic, more suited to simple photo editing.

Inner shadow/stroke works some of the time, but not always. Just like defringe. Let's say you cut a logo. Now the left edge is white, top is purple, bottom is black and right is red. Let's also say these edges are only 1px thick to make it worse. Can't exactly use an automated blending option then, so that's when clipping masks come into play and manually brushing them. I've had it to do it on a ton of different wheels, more than you can imagine. I know my example above is one where inner shadow would've worked fine, so maybe I should've used something else

THK, might I suggest a couple more useful tips? 1. Always remove TM symbols from wheel logos. They don't belong. This should be told to all wheel makers. 2. I notice a lot of wheels with black or colored borders look poor because people don't bother to blend edges. Better explained with an example: Notice the grey, light outline around this? Best viewed on black backdrop to make it more clear. Here it is properly blended, which will look better on any darker background. Yes it makes the edges invisible on black, but no themes really have pure black backgrounds and this is how the edges should look regardless. It's very easy to do and much better than using defringe, which doesn't always work good. 1.) Add a new layer above the logo after you've done the pen cut 2.) Select this new layer and create a clipping mask by either doing it in the layer menu or hitting 'alt + ctrl + g' 3.) Using the dropper tool, choose the color closest to the outter border 4.) Now simply brush along the edges, the clipping mask keeps everything intact so you don't brush outside your cut 5.) When finished, just merge the layer with your main logo layer Feel free to reword any of that how you like but I wish everyone would start adopting those habits.