Thanks to those who had the nice comments about the golden GECDSB logo on the GECDSB Student Reference Portal. I do change it around every now and again and would certainly encourage anyone or anyone's students who have some artistic abilities to contribute.

Below, here's how I turned our District's Logo into gold.

First I needed a copy of the logo in teal. No problem...just went to the district's home page and "borrowed" the teal logo from there. Load the page and right click (CTRL-click on Macintosh) on the logo itself and save it to the hard drive. It's called logo.gif.

Next, fire up Photoshop Elements and open the logo.gif file.

Convert the image to RGB from the IMAGE -- MODE menu.

The image is a combination of white background and teal foreground. I'd like to get rid of the background. For me, the easiest way was to use the magic wand and select all of the white areas. (Hold down the SHIFT key to add more white to your selection.) Now, I really wanted the teal so I'm going to select the INVERSE from the SELECT menu. This might seem silly but if you look closely the teal isn't all the same shade. Rather than playing with the feathering option, I found it easier to grab the white.

From the Layer Menu, create a New Layer via Cut. Nothing spectacular yet but if you look at the layers menu, you'll see the original on the Background layer and the logo on a new transparent layer. We're getting there!

Delete the Background layer. What you should have now is a wonderful looking teal board logo.

Now comes the gold part! From the ENHANCE menu, chose COLOR and then HUE/SATURATION. Use the sliders until you get a shade of gold that you can live with.

You should have a nicely configured gold logo now. But, let's make it even better. The original logo had a three-dimensionality about it. If we now switch to the LAYER STYLES tab, drag and drop any of the styles on your logo and see what you can do to enhance it. Even the Wacky Metallic style adds a nice effect!

Finally, we have to save it. If you take a look at the Portal, you'll notice that the graphic has a transparent background. This is only available if you save your work as a GIF image. Photoshop Elements has you covered there as well.

From the FILE menu, select SAVE FOR WEB. Check to ensure that you're saving as a GIF and that you're asking for a transparent background and save your file. You're done.

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