Happy Wednesday everyone.. Check out this cool tutorial from Dave Cross on using Displacement maps with graphics for Photoshop CS4″
One of the most creative ways to use the Displace filter in Photoshop is to “map” an imported graphic so it follows the contours of an object in a photo; for example, adding an Illustrator logo to a photo of a T-shirt in a realistic way. Add the editability of vector smart objects and you have a match made in heaven.
1 PREPARE THE PHOTOGRAPH
First we need to choose and prepare the photograph onto which we’ll add our logo. We chose an image of a blank T-shirt from iStockphoto.com, deliberately picking one that contained noticeable folds. If the folds are a little too subtle, use the Burn tool to darken the shadows a little and the Dodge tool to slightly lighten the highlights.
2 PREPARE THE DISPLACEMENT MAP
The Displace filter uses a grayscale map to distort the imported object, so we need to create a map for our project. First duplicate (Image>Duplicate) the T-shirt photo and then convert it to grayscale. Although it’s not an ideal day-to-day way to make a beautiful grayscale photo, we’ll use Image>Mode>Grayscale to convert the photo (which works just fine for a displacement map). We don’t want too much texture detail in the map, so use Filter>Noise>Despeckle to soften the texture without losing too much overall detail. Save the map as a PSD file.
Click here to read the rest of the tutorial
In step 2, you tell us how to prepare the image for making a displacement map but you end it there. I duplicated the image and converted it to grayscale. Clicking on the Filter>Displacement Map just asks you to import the map that you’ve already made. You said to save it as a PSD file, but you never really said how to make it in the first place. This tutorial assumes that you already know how to make a displacement filter and everyone who commented seem to already know, so it’s not much of a tutorial it seems. : (