Creating Realistic 3D Flag

This tutorial will show you how you can use displacement maps for placing many kinds of design onto many different surfaces. I’m going to map a 2d flag image using a photograph of some crumpled silk to create a realistic 3D flag;

Step 1.) Open your fabric and your flag image in photoshop. Apply gaussian blur to your fabric photograph (Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur) and experiment with the radius to hide the detail of the fabric and keeping only the folds.

Step 2.) Save your fabric to a PSD file (File > Save as). I saved mine as silk.psd

Step 3.) Starts working on your flag photo. Apply the displacement map filter to your flag with your blurred fabric photo, so mine is the silk.psd file. (Filter > Distort > Displace)

and I get this..

Step 4.) Go back to your fabric photograph and select all area in your fabric photo with your marquee tool or simply by using ctrl+a, copy (ctrl+c), paste it (ctrl+v) on your flag image and change the layer mode to “Hard Light”.

That’s it..and, here’s my final image;

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This tutorial is just one of many great tutorials from the book: How to Cheat in Photoshop by Steve Caplin (Shared with permission).