Transcripts
1. Create and Sell Image Mockups in Photoshop Introduction: Hello, I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this Graphic Design for Lunch class, create mock-ups to use and sell in Adobe Photoshop. Graphic Design for Lunch is a series of classes that teach a range of tips and techniques for creating designs and for working in applications such as Illustrator, Photoshop, and Procreate. Today, we're looking at creating mock-ups in Photoshop to use yourself and to sell. We'll start by looking at how we would mock-up designs onto a photograph of an object. Then we'll go ahead and create a reusable template using smart object. Now, as you're working through these videos, you'll see a prompt which let you recommend this class to others. Please, if you're enjoying the class, give it a thumbs up. These recommendations are essential to me to get my classes in front of more people who just like you want to learn more about Photoshop. If you'd like to leave a comment, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments, and I look at and respond to all of your class projects. So if you're ready now, let's get started making mock-ups to use and to sell in Photoshop.
2. Create and Sell Image Mockups - Part 1: For the first of our Mockups, we're going to take this hand-drawn image of a diamond and we're going to place that on the two pillows in this photograph. Now the photograph itself is from Morguefile.com. So I'm going to give you a download link for that. I'm also going to give you a download link for this prepared diamond image, which is one of my sketches that I'm making available to you. Now, I have a class that shows you how to clean up Scanned Line Art. If you haven't already done that, you may be interested in that and I'll give you a link to that in the class project area. I've already gone ahead and cleaned up this scan. So what I've done is isolated the line work to a separate layer and cleaned up any stray pixels already for you. I just placed a white layer underneath this just so you can see what the line out looks like. Well, we're going to target the topmost layer that has just the lines on it. we're going to right-click and choose to duplicate layer. we're going to duplicate this less and make a copy of it, but we're going to send it to the image that we just downloaded from Morguefile and open in Photoshop. So we're copying it to another image. I'll click OK. Here is the diamond inside the photograph, and of course, it's way bigger than it needs to be. It's also not in the right position. So I'm just going to hold the Shift key as I drag on a corner handle to just reduce it in size, but do that in proportion so it doesn't lose any of its proportions. I was testing it out here and placing it roughly where it needs to go and click the check mark. I'm going to click on the rectangular marquee tool here because you can't actually deselect a tool in Photoshop, but you can select something that allows you to have a look and see how you're going. So this is the dominant in position, but there are few things that we can do to blend it into the image itself. One of them is that I'm going to actually make this a sepia brown color. So I'm going to add a new layer. With layer, new fill layer, and we're going to add a solid color layer and click OK. I'm going to add a brown color and click OK. I'm going to blend this color into the lab below using the Color blend mode. What that does is it colors the lab below. Well, it actually colors both layers below and that's not quite the effect that we want. What we want to do is to clip this layer, so it only affects this one here. So with this topless layer selected, I'm going to choose Layer create clipping mask, and that just clips the effects. So now we have a brown diamond here, but it hasn't affected the rest of the image. Now if you want to, you can double-click on the thumbnail here and you could actually sample a color from the bed head. So if you don't think that you've got quite the color that you want for your diamond, you just go ahead and select a different color from the bed head and click OK. Now that will color your diamond image. Because I've got my diamond pretty much colored, I'm actually going to merge this with the lab below. So I'm gonna right-click and choose merge down because that just bakes in that brown color to the diamond image. Now I'm going back to the move tool. There are a couple of things that I can do to further work on this DOM and one of them is that I can just move it slightly, angle at slightly and I'm looking at the line down the pillow here as an angle that I can use to just rotate this diamond a little bit. We'll click the check mark. I'm also going to reduce the opacity. You can usually reduce the opacity somewhere between 90-95 percent. Again, that will help this drawing to be more melded into the image underneath. Now this point, I'm going to make a duplicate of this layer, so I'm just going to drag it onto the New Layer icon. With the move tool, I'm going to move one copy over onto this pillar. I'm going to do something similar here and just maybe rotate it a little bit. Let's move it over a little bit. So again, It's taking on a slightly different look on this pillow here. Let's go back to this one. I'm going to zoom in a little bit. I'm going to select the move Tool and I'm going to choose edit transform, warp. This adds a warp mesh over the top of the image. We can use this to bend the shape a little bit so we can bend it around where we see the pillow bending. So if we think that the pillow is going to billow out a bit in the middle, then we can billow the middle of the diamond out. If we think it's going to tuck in a bit here, then we can tuck the shape in a little bit. So you can just work around the diamond to give it something of the appearance of actually being drawn onto the pillow rather than being mocked up onto it per se. Let's click the check mark. Then I would go ahead and do that to the second of the diamonds. Another effect that you can use to blend this in is to give it a bit of shadow and highlight. So again, with the last selected, I'm going to Dodge and Burn tools. The Burn tool darkens and the Dodge Tool lightens. So I really want to lighten some elements of this. So I've got the Dodge Tool in hand. I've got the range set to meet tons and exposure to about 40, 50 percent. So we're going to start lightening this shape by just dragging over it. You can say that it is lightening up quite fast. If it lightens up too fast, you can just reduce the exposure a little bit. You may want to lighten it in the areas where the pillow is lightest. So you will avoid these shadow areas and just tip over it a little bit with the brush just to give it a slightly lighter effect and of course you would repeat that with the other one. Now finally, if we zoom into this photo, you will say that the photo itself is not very sharp. In fact, it's really quite fuzzy. The photo is fuzzy, but our drawing isn't. Well, we can fix that too. Again, anything that we can do to this drawing that it's going to make it look more like the photo is really going to help the sense of reality with it. So with this layer selected, I'm going to choose Filter Blur, Gaussian Blur. Obviously that's too big of a blur so it's set to six pixels right now. You want to wind it back to probably something like about one and a half pixels. It doesn't need to be blurred a lot. But if you blurred a little bit, you're going to get some semblance of a suggestion that this really is a drawing on this pillow. So I like to be blurred mine at 1.4 pixels. I'm going to click OK. We can compare the two pillars, one of which I've fixed and one of which I have not fixed. You can see that this one really looks like it's just been slapped over the top. It's just an image that's been put over the top of this other photo. But this one looks a lot more as if this drawing was actually on the pillow itself. So I would go and apply the same changes to this one and then I would have my finished image.
3. Create and Sell Image Mockups - Part 2: Now the next mockup that we're going to create is going to use an entirely different process and we need to do a few things with it as we go. This is the image I'm going to use and again, I'll give you the download link for it. I took this photo in Amsterdam at one stage and I thought it would look rather cute on the billboard so we're going to use this. Let's start with the photograph, right-click and choose "Duplicate Layer." I'm going to take it across into billboard image and I don't need the bear any longer so I can just close that image down. Here I am in the billboard image and you can say that the bear is way larger than the billboard. We will going to the move tool and I'll press Control or Command 0, its control on the PC, Command on the Mac. That just shows me my sizing handles. I'm just going to start bringing this image down in size. I'm holding the Shift key as I do so it's sized in proportion. I wanted to be about that big and I'll just click the check mark. Now I'm just going to hide it by turning off its visibility because right now we don't need it. What we need to do is we need to grab two things here. We need to grab these lights because at the moment in the original image, they're throwing a shadow over the image that is on the billboard. Well we're going to cover up that billboard image but to be realistic, we're going to have to be able to build back in these lights or the shadow from these lights. So I'm going to zoom in here and I'm going to use a tool that it's going to allow me to make a selection over these lights and probably the best tool to use is the Quick Selection Tool. You'll just want it set to a fairly small size and you don't need a lot of these lights, but you will need to be on the light layer, so you will need to have the background layer selected here. So I'm just going to click and drag over the lights and if you get too much, you're going to hold the Alt key on a PC, option on a Mac just to remove the area that has been selected. You're going to select both lights at this stage and you don't have to do the world's best job of this at all. So once you have them selected, you're going to choose Layer New, Layer Via Copy. That just puts these two lights on a separate layer. That's what we've got here. Now, I'm going to select the new layer that we just created. I'm going to treat these two lights differently. I have the last slew tool here and I've just left slew around one of these lights. I'm going to choose Layer New, Layer Via Cut and what that's done is it's cut these two lights on two separate laughs. I've got one on each layer. The reason for this is I'm going to have to deal separately with them to make the shadows. They're not going to be able to be moved together. So I'm going to bring back my billboard and I'm going to the Move Tool. I'm just going to take this light here and what I need to do is to line it up over one of these lights here and so alignment up over this one. Now you can say that while the light might be bending down here, the angle is totally the other way. Well, I'm just going to drag this shape over. As I said, this is not rocket science. You just need to be roughly in the ballpark. So what I've done now is one light positioned over where the shadow was in the image underneath. So that's on and off. I'm just going to hide that for a minute and let's go back to the second light here, and we're going to make that this one here. Let's grab it, rotate it, squash it up a bit, flip it. I'm trying to think it can be a little bit longer and all I'm really worried about is the place where it actually intersects with the shape underneath. So I'm not worried about the stick in the sky right now. This is not the world's best job, but really all you want is a suggestion of this shadow. Now, we're going to bring two lights back and by chance they just happened to be black. So we're going to use the black for the shadow. I'm going to select one of these spaces that's going to be a shadow and I'm going to apply a Gaussian Blur to it, Filter Blur, Gaussian Blur. This time, I do want quite a high blur. I'm thinking about 13 or 14 pixels is going to give me a nice blur. It's way too dark, but that's not what I'm worried about right now. I'm going to select the other shape and I want to apply the exact same blur to it. So I'm just going to choose Filter Gaussian Blur because that will apply the same filter we just applied with the same settings, just saves me from having to do all the work. Now, since I've got these two layers working, I can put them together. So I'm going to select the topmost one and I'm just going to click Merge Down, so they back on one layer. I am going to the Eraser tool. Don't usually use the eraser. I usually use a mask, but this is, again, it's a very simple job and so we're not going to make too much of a batch up of it. So all I'm doing is just erasing the shadow where it is anywhere else but over the actual billboard image. Then I'm going to the capacity for this layer and I'm just going to drag the opacity right down. Of course I can alter that later on. But now I've got some shadows that I can use on my billboard and we're ready to go and put the image onto the billboard and we're going to do that using the vanishing point filter in the very next video.
4. Create and Sell Image Mockups - Part 3: The steps we're about to do are going to be crucial for this process to work. I am going to work through them slowly. First of all, you're going to click to make visible the image that you want to put on the billboard and you're going to target that last so that the layer is colored here in the Layers palette. You're going to Control or Command, click on the thumbnail here, Control click on the PC, Command click on the Mac and then choose edit, copy. That makes a copy of this image into the Windows clipboard or the Mac clipboard. Now you can turn this layer off, you don't need it and it's just going to be in the way and press Control or Command D to deselect the selection. You can also get to that by choosing Select, deselect. We still have a copy of this image on the Windows clipboard, but we need a new layer to put it back into the image in this perspective view. We're going to click to create a brand new layer. We're going to select our brand new layer and we're going to choose Filter vanishing point. Now the vanishing point filter has been around in Photoshop for quite some time. What it allows you to do is to place an object into an image in perspective. But to begin with it, we have to tell Photoshop where the perspective is. We do that by creating a plane. So you'll select the Create a plane tool and you'll just click in the top most corner, and then click down here, and click here, and click here. Now there were three color grids. There's a blue grid and yellow grid and a red grid. If you get yellow or red, you need to work on the grid because you haven't got it into perspective. But I've got a blue one here. I just don't think I've got the best job that I could have. I'm going to zoom in here and I'm going to work with the plane tool on getting a better selection. Now, my suspicion is that somebody's been at this billboard already and that they've already put their image over it and they haven't done the world's best job when they did. So I'm just going to make sure that when I put my image onto the billboard, it's going to cover up what is already there. I'm just making sure that each of these corners is covering the part of the billboard that I actually want to cover up. I think I'm pretty happy with that now. I'm just going to zoom out. Now I've got my grid, but I've also got my image on the Windows clipboard. What I'm going to do now is to paste my image in, there's just no option for it. But if you know the paste commands, then you can do it and that's pressing Control and V on the PC Command and V on the Mac and what should happen is that the image should now be placed in over the top of your billboard. It just doesn't look very good right now. I'm just going to drag on it. I'm going to drag on it over the grid. As you drag over the grid, you'll see that it just pops in to perspective. Now, while I've got it, I'm actually going to drag down because I want to say this top corner up here. I'm going to click here on the Transform tool because my bear image is way too big. I'm going to go and grab this corner handle and hold the Shift key as I drag it down, then I'm going to let go everything, pull it back up again and again shift drag. The shift drag is really important because you really need this image to stay in its correct perspective and you'll lose your perspective very quickly if you don't hold the Shift key as you drag on it. Now it's gone a little bit small, so I'm going to shift drag to make it a little bit bigger. I'm just going to position it to make sure that it's right over this billboard. If I've got a little bit of wiggle room, then I can work out exactly what portion of the image I want to appear on the billboard. When I've got everything looking all right, I'm going to click Okay. That will take me out of the vanishing point filter and now I have an image that is now on my billboard. I also have the light shadow here. I'm just going to drag that layer up so it appears above the image on the billboard. So we've got our shadow from our lights in position. There's one last little paste that we may want to bring in and it all depends pretty much on what image you're using. Just going to zoom into the bottom corner here of the billboard. I probably don't need it for my image, but you may. I'm going to show you how to do it. There's this little piece of twig that is over the top of the image. If you've got a light image, then you're going to want it. I'm going to select the background. I'm going to lasso tool. I'm just going to lasso around this twig and the little bit of twig that is over on the very edge here. It's a really, really small selection. I'm going to choose Edit copy and then Edit paste and that just puts this on a new layer. I'm going to take that to the very top of the layer stack. I'm going to bring back the two portions of the image that I want to use. At the top here is this little twig. Now you can do a couple of things here. You could mask it or you could just go and erase it. I think probably for this size job, erasing is going to be just fine. You're just going to get in really close to where you can see it, go and get the eraser tool. You'll want a very hard edge eraser. Here's my hardness value. I'm going to wind it back to about 90%, but that's just plenty. I'm going to shrink it down really, really small, make sure that I'm working on the layer that actually has the twig on it. I'm just going to erase around it. Now, as I said, if you've got a lighter image here, the twig is going to be really important to just continue the look of this billboard. It's not really needed in the case of my image because I'm very dark in the corner here. Now you will also want to go to the blend modes here and you'll want to select darken because that will just ensure that the darkest pixels are used and it's just going to remove that fringing effect that I've got around the edge of the tree branch. So I'm just going to choose dark and press Control or Command zero to zoom back out. Before you finish, you may want to come back to the layer that has the image on it and just reduce the opacity a little bit. What you'll be doing is actually bringing back a very small amount of the image underneath. You want to use this with discretion. But blending it into the billboard underneath is also a good idea so just adjusting your opacity a bit. If your image is really sharp and if the billboard image is not so sharp, then you'll also want to apply a blur to this layer. Again, Filter blur, Gaussian blur. Depending on how soft the original image is, you may want to apply a larger or smaller blur. Now, I'm just going to apply about a 1 to 1.5 pixel blur for my image because I think that's probably what this image needs. There's a second way of marking up a piece of artwork in Photoshop.
5. Create and Sell Image Mockups - Part 4: For our last mockup effect, we're going to do something fairly similar to the first mockup effect but with a big difference. This time, we're going to create a reusable template. These are the kind of mockup templates that you can buy online. I'm going to show you how you can create them. Potentially, you could give these away on your blog, or you could sell them. Now I'm going to start with this image here which you've probably seen in some of my other classes. What we're going to do is we're going to mock it up onto this cup here. But we're going to do it in such a way that the image could be easily replaced. I'm going to my scooter image. I'm going to right-click the "Layer". Choose Duplicate Layer. I'm going to place this in the coffee cup image and click "Okay". Now I'm giving you the scooter as a download, and I'm also going to give you the link to download this particular image so you can download it to follow along if you wish. Now I'm going to place my scooter roughly in position, and I'm just going to size it down. I'm thinking that's pretty good, so I'm going to click the check mark. Now before we do anything else, what we're going to do is convert this layer into a smart object because that one allows to replace this layer at any time, and we'll still have all the effects we're about to put on this layer available for any other image. I'm going to right-click this "Layer" here, and I'm going to choose Convert to Smart Object. There are couple of things that we can't do with a smart object layer, but we're going to get around that with a workaround. I'm going to select this Layer. I'm going to reduce the opacity to about 90 percent because that's one way that we can get this shape to more effectively blend in to the coffee cup below. We're also going to set the blend mode to multiply because that's going to blend this in with the cup underneath and actually borrow the shadows. So you can see this side of the scooter's become quite dark while this side's quite a bit lighter. Now we're going to apply a warp to it, so we're going to choose Edit, Transform, Warp. This time, we're going to be very careful about actually bending the image to match the bend in the coffee cup because the coffee cup has a very, very curved shape and we want to make sure that our image is going to be bent so it looks as if it were actually applied to the coffee cup. Now when you're working with this mesh, you can either drag on the corners, or you can drag on the line itself, or you can just drag in the middle of the image, and all of those are going to have an effect on the underlying image so you're just pulling it and bending it as you go. I'm going to call that pretty much good. I'm going to click the check mark. I'm going to click on the rectangular marquee tool just so I can move away from this image just to get a look at it. Well, one of the other things I'm going to do here, even though we don't have a totally out-of-focus image, we do have a cut that is a little bit soft, so I'm going to apply a gaussian blur to this layer. With the layer selected, I'm going to choose Filter, Blur, and then Gaussian Blur. I'm going to wind up my blur to something around 1.3, 1.5 just to try and get this image to look as if it really is part of the coffee cup and not stuck on afterward. Click "Okay". Now the only technique that we've used so far that we're not able to use on this particular smart object layer is dodge and burn. If I go and get the burn tool, you'll see that I'm just not allowed to paint on this layer. But what we could do is we could paint on a new layer. What I'm going to do is I'm going to choose Layer, New Fill Layer, Solid Color. I'm going to click "Okay". I'm going to fill this layer with neutral gray. Neutral gray has its RGB values each set to 128, so it's 128, 128, 128. Just click "Okay". Then if I blend that back into the image using soft light blend mode, you'll see that there's actually no change at all in the image. If I turn this layer on or off, you'll see no change in the image. I'm going to rasterize this last. I'm just going to right-click and choose Rasterize Layer. With this layer rasterized, I can dodge and burn on the gray-filled layer, and it will affect the image underneath. So I'm going to the Burn Tool which is the darkening tool. I've got a low exposure. I'm working on the midtones. I actually think my exposure is probably still a little bit higher, so I'm going to choose about eight percent. I'm just going to burn over this side of the scooter, and I'm going to the Dodge Tool which is the lightening tool. Again, I've got it set to midtones. Again, I'm going to just reduce the exposure down a little bit to around 14 percent, make my brush really big. I'm just going to lighten this side of the scooter. This is a dodge and burn effect. right now, it's applied to the cup and the scooter. But if I create a clipping mask here by selecting this Layer and to choose layer Create Clipping Mask, then you'll see that it's applied only to the layer underneath which is the scooter layer. It's only darkening and lightening the scooter and not the cup underneath. So far so good. This is all you would need for a mockup template. You would deliver this to your customer with a placeholder image in here as a smart object layer. What you would tell them is that they can replace this layer with their image. The way they do it is to select on this layer, right-click, and choose Replace Contents. They'll go and select the image that they want to use in place of the scooter. We'll do that now. I'm going to click on "Replace Contents", select the image I want to use as a replacement, and click "Place". Now, I've selected an image that is a Ping image and it has a transparent background. Of course, it's much too large for this image. But that's fine because either you or your client will go ahead and click on the move tool, and then you'll hold the Shift key as you size down this object. Now the smart filters are going to be disabled until you've committed. That's all that warning message is telling you. You're just going to press Control or Command zero just to zoom out so that you can see the handles if you've lost them. Then just move your image into position and size it. As soon as you have it in position and size, you can just click the check mark. What will happen is that Photoshop will apply all the exact same effects as you applied to the image that you created, the scooter, are being applied to this image here, so it's got a blur on it. You can see the Gaussian blur here, it's also been warped, and you've got this layer here that is controlling some shadow and highlight on this image. That's how you could create mockups that you can sell or give away using a smart object layer. Your project for this class is going to be to create one or more of these effects yourself. You can use the images that I've provided in the download links, or you can go and find your own images to use. Post your finished project in the class project area. I hope that you've enjoyed this class and that you've learned something about creating your own mockups in Photoshop and also how you could create mockup templates to sell. As you're working through this class, you will have seen a prompt to give it a thumbs up. Please, if you're enjoying the class and learning from it, give it a thumbs up. These recommendations help me get my classes in front of more people who, just like you, want to learn more about Photoshop. If you'd like to leave a comment, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments, and I look at and respond to all of your class projects. My name's Helen Bradley. Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of Graphic Design for Lunch, and I look forward to seeing you in an upcoming episode soon.
Helen Bradley, Graphic Design for Lunch™
