By David Gewirtz
In the past two weeks, we discussed how you can overcome various kinds of lens distortion, both using a powerful add-on filter as well as some of Photoshop's built-in tools. This week, we're going to do something different: we're going to purposely distort one image to make it fit on another.
Our goal is simple: we want to put the Connected Photographer logo on a jacket, making it look like it was silk screened onto the jacket originally. This technique, which makes use of a technique called displacement maps, is ideal for any situation where you want an image to conform to an irregular surface.
As a first step, let's start off with our irregular surface, in this case the jacket shown in Figure A.
FIGURE A
We want to put our logo on the surface of this jacket. (click for larger image)
We pulled this particular image out of our clip art collection because it provided a relatively large, single-color surface to work from. Although doable, it would have been far less likely that we'd want to put our logo over a cloth surface that was highly patterned.
Once you've chosen your destination image, you'll want to create a map from that image. What's going to happen is that we're going to create a file that, based on the darkness of an area of the image, will displace another image. This is actually far harder to explain than to tell you what to do, so I'm going to do exactly that.
Take the image that's your source image, and copy it to a new file, which will become your map file. Apply a low-level gaussian blur to the entire image. I used a setting of 2, and that was more than enough. Next, if you have access to channels (and, of course, Photoshop does), slightly shift the green channel up and to the left and the red channel down and to the right, causing poor color registration. You can see the result of these transformations in Figure B.
FIGURE B
Blur, then shift the red and green channels. (click for larger image)
Next, using the blurred and shifted image, select an area where the logo is going to go. You can see our selection in Figure C.
FIGURE C
Select the area where you're going to place the logo. (click for larger image)
Copy this area, paste it into a new file, and save it as a separate .PSD file. For ease of naming, I called it MAP.PSD, shown in Figure D.
FIGURE D
Here's the actual displacement map, saved to MAP.PSD.
Next, you'll want to grab the logo to be displaced. I pulled the Connected Photographer logo from our library, sized it down small enough to fit in the location I wanted, and rotated it slightly.
