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T-Shirt Mock-up with Simple Props

Okay. And here I wanted to show you, this was how I photographed some of this. This was not at the library. This I shot at my house. So, in my basement, and my son was running around, so I had that extra challenge. So, what you don't see are the outtakes where he came and got his hands all on the shirt or grabbed my camera. But all I was using for equipment is natural light. So, this was up against a big patio door. So, you can see the natural light. So, I shut off all the lights in the house because you don't want to mix the natural light with the ambient light, because you get some color grossness happening. So, this was just natural light. And on the floor is just some foam core, just foam board, and then up above is what you would put a science fair project on, like a folding one. And what's nice about that is then they stand up by themselves. Because it's great when you have someone with you and you can be like, "Hold this," and "Move it this way." But I'm usually working by mysel...

f in five-minute bursts in-between toddler mania and nap time and whatever. So, I love that because I can just set it where I want it. So, I just laid the shirt on the poster board and then I just stood on the backside of the standing board and just shot over from above, I shot down on it. And that's it, it's super simple. No fancy equipment and anybody can do it. You could even use your phone. So, here is what we end up with. So, this was the the shirts and the board, and it's pretty straightforward. And I've already put some things in here just to facilitate the timeline, but let's... I thought I deleted these, so let's select this shirt. There it is, straight out of camera and everything. Let's select the shirt, we'll do some adjustments to it. We'll create a displacement map, and we'll make this so we can change the color of the shirt, put something else in the background, do a lot of things with it. I mean we could use it just like this, and that would be fine. But we have time and it's nice to have these files and these things be more versatile. So, I'm just going to grab that quick selection tool and make a really quick selection. And if we were to really examine this, it's going to have some really jagged-y edges because that's how this tool works. So, if we want to refine this edge a little bit, we can come up to the select menu, and choose select and mask. And here we see the rough selection and you can see the edges are kind of garbley, I call it. I think it would be fine, we could use it like this. Because reality is, most of the time when you create mock-ups, they're just going to be on screen. So, it doesn't have to be as perfect as it would if you were going to print something up and put it on a billboard or put it up in Times Square. It's just going to be usually, at least for me when I'm making mock-ups, I'm just throwing it on Facebook or on Instagram and it's a very small file, small image space, so we don't have to worry about it. But just to show you, so I made this rough selection and then we could come in here and have Photoshop detect the edge and clean this up a little bit with a little smooth. So, I'm just adding, you can see here, just smooth that edge a little bit. I don't want to do a ton because then it looks like I smudged it. See if I can overdo it for a minute. Plus Photoshop gets a little bit hung up trying to render that. So, we just want to keep it really low, really simple. That'll create a nicer selection. And then what I'm going to do is just copy this into its own layer. So, I press CMD or CTRL+J and just copy it up. Now, I didn't select the shadows, so the shadows are not with it. So, if I wanted to take this background and completely put something else there, I'd have to make my own shadows, which is really easy. You can use, you know, make a drop shadow or whatever. It's really easy. But in this case, I'm going to keep the background because I just don't want to mess with it. And we'll put a pattern in here and do something different, so you can see how that works. So, just know that the shirt up here, this shirt has no shadows. So, nothing wrong with that, but you've got to keep it in mind. When you're doing mock-ups, shadows or like a whole thing. So, it's important that you make shadows match when you're compositing things. If you are taking pictures of..I also, at this time I photographed his toy soccer ball and some of his toys and I thought we could put those in. And we can, you just have to make sure all the shadows are going to match. So, that's my thing on that. Next, if we want to change the color of the shirt, for whatever reason, we can use a hue saturation adjustment layer. So, I'll just throw this away and make a new one. So, from the bottom of the layers panel, this little yin yang button, we just click that, and choose hue saturation. And then we get the sliders here, and I can just drag the slider around, and it's going to change the color of the shirt. So, whatever we want to go with, we'll go with some kind of blue here. And I'm going to reduce the saturation because it looks really fake if it's like this. That's not real looking, so I'm going to reduce that. What's nice about having this hue saturation adjustment layer, instead of just targeting the shirt itself, is because if I clip it, let me just clip the hue saturation adjustment to the shirt. So, I'm going to hold down ALT or OPTION, and you see my cursor turn into this funny little square with the downward pointing arrow. If I click between the hue saturation and the shirt layer while I hold ALT or OPTION, it clips so that the color adjustment only applies to the shirt. And do you see what happens now? We see like a yellow glow around it. That's because the color reflection from the yellow shirt is bouncing onto the white background underneath. So, if I don't also make sure that this background is being affected, then this looks really phony. So, just stuff to keep in mind when you're doing mock-ups. So, because it's not clipped now, the way that adjustment layers work is like rain clouds, and they rain down. When it rains, it rains down. For now, anyway, on planet Earth that's how it operates. So, the adjustment layers are the same way. Whatever adjustments is there is raining downward and it's going to affect every layer underneath. So that's going to include the shirt as well as the background. So, that will just tint, that will also change then this little reflection here, so it will match the shirt. So, convenient. But it is nice that we have the shirt because, on it's own, in case that we wanted to replace the background completely or if we wanted to do a levels adjustment just to the shirt, I could click CMD or CTRL, click the thumbnail here to put marching ants around it, and maybe let's click a levels adjustment just to maybe exaggerate some of the contrast there. So something like that. So now we'd be ready to put our artwork in here, but first, we're going to create the displacement map. So, what are we doing? We're going to put the artwork on the shirt and we need it to essentially warp around the folds in the fabric, but we're not going to just warp it like we warped the coffee mug. And we're not going to distort it like we did the perspective on the easel. We want it to go with the shirt. And the way we do that is we create what's called a displacement map. And the way you do that is you take your image and you make it black and white. So, I'm just going to do a quick and dirty... Well, we can just add a quick hue saturation adjustment layer, take the saturation out. So, something like this. So, just black and white. I'm hiding all the other stuff for now, just for this thing, just to create basically the template for Photoshop to distort the artwork. So, when you create that template, it's called a displacement map. Your image needs to be black and white, and that's it. So, we save this, and it needs to all be in the same place. So, like I can't crop to just the shirt or move the shirt somewhere else. The map needs to match the image that you're using it in. So, I'll save this as a... I'll just put it on my desktop. And I always just call these, they're just temporary files like I'm going to be done with it as soon as I use it, so I'll just call it map. You can see I have one here. So, we'll call it map, replace whatever I had there, and then I'm going to undo all those things. So, we're back with our shirt here. So, now we'll put our artwork in here or we can use it with a smart object. So, I'll just draw a little rectangle for wherever we want our artwork to go. Something like this. We'll put it above the hue saturation layer, so... If we put it above the rain cloud here of the adjustment layers, then they won't affect it. And I'll convert this to a Smart Object. Convert to Smart Object, good. And now I'm just going to press CMD or CTRL+ T and rotate it so that it matches the angle of the shirt. Something about like that. Okay. Now let's go put our artwork in here. So we'll double-click. And we're going to use photographs for this. So, I happen to have these three images of cameras. And I thought, "Well, this will be fun. Let's drag these in." And they're all huge so scale them down quickly. I'm not going to bother making them Smart Objects because it's fine. It's fine for this little instance. And you'll notice that they have the white box with them and I'm not even caring. And you'll see why in a minute. Because I think it's cool. No. I'm kidding. So we're going to create this little collage of cameras. Which one haven't we done yet? Oh, this is the one we need. So I'm just dragging them all in. Not even caring. Not even minding that they have a white box. I think this one should go up top. Maybe. We'll see. Something like this because we're going to hide... Well, we can even leave the purple for now. But if I take all of these layers and I just change their blend mode to multiply, the box disappears. Multiply is a blend mode where that's just how it behaves. Things that are white disappear. So if you have a truly white background, you can make it disappear in a flash. All right, let's hide our purple rectangle. Now, we're going to see the white again because it's not interacting with anything else. But we'll get rid of it in the next step, so we will actually go ahead and put that back to normal. So we'll go ahead and save this, and close it, close our cameras. And now we see it here, of course, it has the white boxes, and we can change this to multiply. Did I just cut off the camera? I did. Let's go back in here and we'll individually make these in multiply. There we go. All right. Now we're going to apply the displacement map that we need to apply. So, here is our Smart Object. This is our artwork. So to run the displacement filter, we're going to come into the filter menu and choose Distort, Displace. And it's going to have some settings here. We don't, in most cases, need to mess with those. Now it's going to ask us what do we want to use to map the distortion or the displacement. And we're going to choose conveniently the map that we made just a minute ago. We'll go ahead and click open and apply it. Now, it's very hard to see so I'm going to undo and redo. Or, actually. we can just hide it here in the layers panel. Do you see the subtle shift that it creates? So this shirt doesn't have huge wrinkles. But if it did, it would be more dramatic. So the subtle shift of this displacement map is just going to, you see, like here is a good spot you can see. So here's not displaced, so the camera is just flat across the bottom. But when we displace it, it ripples over these bumps in the shirt, which is pretty handy. So that adds the realism and makes it look like this is actually on the shirt. And the Multiply Blend Mode is what makes it look also like the photo here, in this case, of the cameras, is actually interacting with the fabric. And we can see the texture of the fabric. And we lose the white box, so that's a nice bonus. So things that are white will disappear with that mode. And then, of course, just for fun, I thought, "Well, let's put in some props" So I thought this is for a hipster baby, this T-shirt. So we have some hipster icon or some hipster props like a mix tape, some rolls of film, and, of course, a fedora for baby hipster, and a little logo here. And then I thought, "Well, let's add in a pattern to be in the background." So to do that, we're going to add another adjustment layer with a pattern. And I hope I have it loaded. Where are you pattern? This one maybe? And I scaled it. I don't remember exactly how I did that. And I change the blend mode to multiply, and then we just got to get it under. We want to block the shirt. So I'm going to take the shirt down here and select that, and then I'm going to come up here to the fill or the mask for the pattern fill, and I'm going to just fill that in with black so the pattern will not appear on the shirt. But because the pattern is in multiply mode, we still see the shadows underneath the shirt. So let me show you. If I change this back to normal, the shadow disappeared. Did you see that? But if I switch that back from normal to multiply, then we're able to see through the pattern layer to the background, and any changes of tone will read through. A big key with mock-ups is the shadows. Making sure you keep shadows, or make new shadows, or have them all matching. That's really important. Multiply Blend Mode is just really helpful for a lot of different things, as we saw here. Other than that, the Smart Objects are key so that you don't have to... You don't have to use them. You could just put in your artwork, and then warp it or whatever, directly to the artwork. But then if you need to edit it later, then you have to redo it. So it just saves you that hassle. And it makes it easy so you can reuse all your hard work for different mock-ups later. - Would it be really hard to make something from nothing? Like if you wanted to have an empty glass and have it filled with water? - Depends on your definition of "very hard." If we look, I happen to have this nice glass of water right here. So if we look at a glass of water, I mean, it's kind of a complicated thing, right? We have reflections going on. We have distortions happening. There's all kinds of refraction. Is that what it's called? The light, right? So the light's coming in and refracting and bending and all that. So you would have to create all of that. So it's totally doable. And there are people who do that kind of thing. I'm not one of them but there are people who do. But I wouldn't categorize that as easy. But it can be done. And if that's something that you want to do, you'll figure it out. You'll find a way to do that. You can make it happen. You bet. So, totally possible but not... There's not a button for that.