How to create a displaced image on a surface adding light and shadow intensity

by Tracy Pori

This exercise should help you get your feet wet with the new PSP 9 Displacement feature and help you to learn a little bit about the application of light and shadow for a more dramatic effect.

Right mouse click each of these image and save them to your hard drive. Open both in PSP 9 Beta.	Image courtesy Dover Publications free samples
1. - The first step is to duplicate the T-Shirt image. What we are going to do is pull the saturation out and the contrast up. Adjust, Hue/Saturation/ Colorize. Pull the Saturation slider down to 0 then click OK to apply the changes. Now to really pull out those shadows adjust the brightness and contrast. Adjust, Brighness/Contrast, Brightness/Contrast. The settings will vary dependant on the contrast of the original image. Click OK to accept the changes.
2. - Copy the sunflower image and paste it as a new layer on the T-Shirt. Use the Interactive Deform tool to scale and rotate to fit.
3. - Click the Effects menu, Distort, Displace. Make sure to choose the grey image that you made in preparation. These are the settings that I used. I found that I needed no rotation for this image, but for other you may need to experiment to get a good distortion. More on that later or check JP's tutorial for details. Click OK to accept the changes.
4. - Go back to the desaturated T-Shirt image. Click the Adjust menu, Brighness/Contrast, Threshold. Set the slider so that the dark shadows are visible. This will form the basis for the shadows in the folds of the shirt. Click OK to accept the changes.
5. - Next blur the entire image with a Gaussian blur Radius 3. Adjust, Blue, Gaussian blur. Copy this image and paste it as the top layer in the T-Shirt image with the displaced art as a new layer. Set the layer Blend Mode to Multiply.
6. - Now you can either go to the displaced image layer and use the Magic Wand to select the outside of the diplaced image and then click the top layer to activate it and press the Delete key on your keyboard to clear away all but the displaced area, or you can use the eraser to erase it away. The idea is that we want shadows and light only on the displaced art.
7. - Go back to the black and white image that you used for a shadow, undo the Gaussian blur and the Threshold. Now Threshold again but this time leave more of the white area. this will form the basis for your lights. Click OK to accept the changes. Apply the Gaussian blur with the same settings. Now go to the Adjust menu and choose Negative Image. Copy and paste this as a new layer on top of the shadow layer.
8. - Change the layer Blend Mode to Dodge. Pull the Opacity slider down to between 30 and 38. Clear away all of the outsides with the same method you used to clear away the shadow outsides.
9. - Hide the Background T-Shirt layer and merge the visible layers and do any cleanup on unwanted edges etc.
No light and shadow effects, looks OK but...	Add some light and shadow and that image really pops!