With a paint brush in hand, Tina Vaziri is often away having adventures with Mr. Bee. Her travel notes are filled with illustrations, sketches, and stories.

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image displacement mask | June 6, 2007

Place images or text on clothing or skin without the mess of screen printing or the pain of permanent tattoos. I gave this girl’s pretty dress extra awesomeness by placing one of my illustrations on it by using a displacement mask in Photoshop. This process contours one image to the surface of another, making the depth (lights and darks) of the background image control the distortion of the placed image.

    Tools:
  • Photoshop CS or higher
  • A high resolution photo with some skin or clothing
  • An image or text to place

Open your high res. photo in Photoshop. Select All and Copy, then create a new document and Paste.

  • Go to Image > Mode > Grayscale.
  • Go to Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur. Set the Radius to 2.5 pixels. This will create a softer more natural look for our displacement mask.


  • Save this file as Displacement.psd and close it.
  • Back to our original high resolution image. Place the text or image you want onto the skin or clothing, resize and rotate for a proper fit.


  • Optional: For my image I needed to mask off a small part of my placed image because the girl’s hand was in the way. Make sure you are on your text or image layer that you placed onto your photo. Click the Add layer mask button at the bottom of your layers pallet, this button looks like a rectangle with a circle inside of it.


  • With your Brush tool set to Black, and at a Hardness of 13% and an Opacity of 42%, brush away at the area that you need to mask off (make sure you are on your Mask layer, and not brushing on your actual image). Hit X on your keyboard to switch your color to White. Brush away around the area until you have it perfect. Don’t be afraid to go back and forth till you have it.
  • Right click on the Mask layer and click Apply Layer Mask.


  • Go to Filter > Distort > Displace and place the settings at Horizontal Scale: 6, Vertical Scale: 6, Stretch To Fit, and Repeat Edge Pixels. You may have to experiment with these numbers to get yours to work for your image.


  • Select your saved Displacement.psd file and hit OK.
  • In your layers pallet, set the Layer Mode of this displaced image to Multiply and the Opacity at around 85% (or experiment).
  • Optional: Duplicate this layer by dragging it onto the Create a new layer button on your layers pallet. Set the Layer Mode of this to Overlay at about 90%. I also created a Layer Mask for this Overlay layer and brushed on some of the deep wrinkles to create more shadows and depth. You’re done!



    Related posts:

    1. glowing magic in photoshop
    2. digital photo editing
    3. free photoshop brushes
    4. photo editing in photoshop
    5. brushed metal effect
    6. image out of text
    7. wood engraving effect
    8. using textures effectively




    Filed under: art & design tutorials


    7 Responses to “image displacement mask”

    1. ellia Says:

      aw, what an awesome idea! i love all your how to’s!!!!and your artwork is a beaut!!! how do you like life without college???

      thx for stopping by, and best wishes on illustrating, my dear!

      June 6th, 2007 at 11:07 pm


    2. Tina Says:

      Ellia, glad you like it all! Life after college is great, nothing to complain about.

      June 7th, 2007 at 2:26 pm


    3. Adam Says:

      Here is a virtual bloody mary…. yummmm!

      June 9th, 2007 at 4:57 am


    4. Fabián Fucci Says:

      Nice tutorial. It would be nice to add an abstract at the beginning saying it uses a displacement mask for achieving the effect, just for completness.

      June 9th, 2007 at 7:41 am


    5. Tina Says:

      Fabián, thanks for the tip. I will add that to all my tutorials.

      June 9th, 2007 at 8:17 am


    6. A. Says:

      Nice!
      Though, I think the effect probably would work better on things that are not so wrinkled/folded. If that image was on the skirt in reality, it wouldn’t actually look like that because the folds would disrupt it…

      January 4th, 2009 at 1:50 am


    7. Tina Says:

      A little less wrinkled would work best, but in the skirt you can see the change in the applied image better. The displacement mask does wrap the image around folds and wrinkles to an extend, but it can’t judge the deep folds as well.

      January 4th, 2009 at 12:35 pm


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