Your Designs Will Never Be The Same Again

You clicked on this video because you want to make your very own mock-up with realistic textures and contours, just like this one here. So let’s do just that. And first, I suggest that you make a folder for the mock-up so everything is just neat and orderly.

You can apply this technique to just about anything from clothing to woodwork and to material like this fabric right here. First help me write my cv going to save this Photoshop document as the mock-up itself because we’re soon going to be making a displacement with a different file. We’re not only going to be working with displacements by the way, there are several steps and elements to this amazing mock-up outcome.

Add A Gaussian Blur To Your Design

Next, add a gaussian blur to your design and we want a blur that is very subtle and just takes the edge of the design, so to speak. This will help the next step function a lot better on your PSD and mock-up. So we’re now going to save this as a different document and label it something like displace or displacement.

Once that’s saved, close it and open back up the original mock-up document. Now, this is very, very important. You need to choose a color that matches close to your base layer. So for me, that’s going to be white. I’m going to take the rectangle tool and cover the entire canvas just like this. Basically, you want to cover the area where your mock-up will go.

Convert Layers Into A Smart Object

You then want to convert that layer to a smart object. We will apply a blend mode, and again this will depend on the color of your design. And my design is quite bright so I want to use the more darken blend modes. And for now, I’m just going to run with darken. So this layer is going to be where your design actually goes. You know, it’s that kind of layer you see on downloadable mock-ups that says put your design here.

Great! On this layer we will now go up to filter, distort and displace. The default settings should be good but you can always experiment with your own design and settings. We want to use the displace document that we saved earlier as the map to displace this layer upon.

Layers Panel Should Look

At this point, your layers panel should look something like this. And it’s probably wise to label these layers accordingly and not like me being lazy. Now, if you double click the layer for which the design will go on, it opens up in a new window. This is what you’re probably familiar with when you’re using mock-ups that you’ve downloaded. And just to show you how things are looking at the moment, let me add a blue square and then click the save button.

Also Read: Query Deserves Freshness (QDF)

Crucially, not save as, but just save. And as you can see, the displace map does an okay job at contouring the design over my rippled fabric. But we can do much better than this. Now, you might think I’ve gone a bit crazy with all the hellos, but it’s just to show you how to do the next step. So this is on my design window, which I will save once again. And you can see the outcome isn’t the best.

Liquidify Option

With the layer that your design goes on selected, navigate to the liquidify option. We want to choose the use layer as the layer with your background design on, so in my case that’s the fabric material. And make sure the mode is set to behind. You can lower the opacity of the above design so you’re able to see what you’re actually doing, which is pretty helpful. And then of course adjust the brush size and the pressure, and that pressure is basically just the intensity of the effect.

Contours Of Your Fabrics

What you want to do is to carefully and manually go around your design and change the layer so it matches the contours of your fabric or whatever you’ve got below. I’m not going to lie, this does take time but it offers the best results.

You’re not applying this effect to the text, rather to the layer the text is on. That means that anything saved onto this layer will actually have the same contouring effect. As you can see here on my design, I’m just nudging things ever so slightly so the design itself looks neat and proper. And like I said, this will take a lot of time to do but the outcome is totally worth it.

When You’re Finished

Simply just click the okay button and the liquidify effect that you’ve just made will be applied to that layer. It’s all about being neat and thinking about how the contour of the fabric will affect your design. By the way, I got the fabric image from on splash.com. And then finally you will end up with a realistic mock-up that shows textures and contours.