Showcase Your Artwork – Make Your Own Mockups | in Adobe Photoshop

1. Introduction: I believe that one of the most important parts of a creative business is how you showcase your work. If you're an illustrator or pattern designer. Lockups are a great way to showcase the artwork and visualize how your design will look on real life products. My name is Mariam Beck and I'm a surface pattern designer based in Stockholm, Sweden. In my first skill share class, you learned all about how to make pattern design using Adobe draw and illustrator. In this class, we will talk all about how to play start work that you create and showcase it on mockups. You can use mockups on your website in a look book in social media. Mock-ups are a great way to make future possible clients visualize how your design will look on their products.Which can be a deal breaker.If you're trying to sell your artwork to clients. You will learn what mockups are, why you should use them and most importantly, how to create your own mockups using free stock photos and Photoshop.You can use your own artwork or download my original pattern design in class. To take this class, It's good to have a basic understanding of Photoshop.We will go through everything from basic simple placement to more advanced techniques, such as working with prospectives and textures. I will teach you different techniques and how to work with the details. So you can create your own high-quality professional looking mockups for yourself. 2. What is a mockup & why use it?: Let's start with what mockups are and why you should use them. Digital mockup is basically a photo of a product that you manipulate to make it look like your artwork is printed on that product. It's usually a Photoshop file where you can place your artwork on an object. The higher quality the mockup is, the more realistic the mockup will look. I always aim for the mockup to look as real as possible. It just gives a much more professional impression. Why would you like to showcase your artwork on products? Well, for starters, it's so much fun to see your patterns and illustrations come to life on real things. Even if it's just a photo of a real thing, it can help you visualize what type of product your artwork will agree on, and it's a great way to make future clients visualize how your artwork would look on their products. Which in the long run can be a deal breaker if you tried to sell your artwork to clients. A little bonus if you just starting to make illustrations and parents, is that by seeing your artwork on a mockup, you can get a little confidence boost as it actually can feel like your pattern is printed on a real-life product, which can be a really cool feeling if you haven't seen that before. What's the difference between ready-made mockups and the ones you make yourself? Well, ready-made are just that. They are prepared PSD files that you download and then place your artwork in. They are often super easy and fairly quick to use. But on the downside, the high-quality ones often cost a little bit of money. There are some good for free, but it's quite time-consuming to find them, and it's usually hard to find free mockups for all sorts of products. I spent a whole lot of time googling free to use ready-made mockups. I have a few tips on where to find them and how to know that they are high-quality. I will share this later in class. Let's talk about making your own mockups, which is the focus of this class. It definitely has its advantages to be able to make your own mockups. You could use free stock photos, which means that you don't need to pay anything to make a mockup. You can make unique ones that no one else uses, and you can make some really nice lifestyle mockups with photos that are more in action than normally the ready-made mockups are. You can, of course, also buy stock photos and make mockups from them. In that case, is not free. But if you don't find a ready-made markup or a free photo that suits your needs. Buying a stock photo might be a good choice. Another option is to take your own photos and make mockups from them, which is a super cool thing if you're good with the camera. I think that the hardest part of making your own mockups is to find great photos to use, because it's not every photo that will make a good mockup. We will go through what you should look for when searching for photos and how to know if a photo makes a good mockup later in this class. Personally, I use both ready-made mockups and I make my own. I have a large library of files that I built up for a few years. With everything from free to paid, ready made, and the ones that I made myself using photos. When I create new patterns, I use mockups a lot for myself to get a good visual of how a pattern or collection would look on a certain product. If you're following me on Instagram, you probably noticed that I share my mockups there as well as in my look book and on my website, all to showcase my patterns. 3. Your project: The class project is to make a mock-up using one of the free photos that are linked to in the description. Or of course, all of them if you want to full practice. The class is built up so that we begin with the easiest techniques and continue to advance for each lesson. I encourage you to try out all of the techniques that I teach you in this class, then you can see for yourself the difference that the details make, so that you later on can decide how detailed you want to work with your own mock-ups. Basically, the more you work with the details, the better the mock-up will look. The photos we will use in this class are free to use for both commercial and non-commercial purposes. You can download them in class through the links in the description. You can choose to work with your own artwork or with my original pattern that you can download in class. And if you have any questions at all, please feel free to ask them on the community page. 4. Where & how to find photos: So the hardest part of making your own mock-ups usually is to find great photos. There are many sites where you can find photos that are free to use for both commercial, and non-commercial purposes. I have a few favorite sites that I use, and I'll share them with you in this lesson. Let's start with the free photos. The sites that I use the most, and recommend are on splash and pixels. The photos are really high-quality, and the sites are easy to use. Their photos are free to use for commercial and non-commercial purposes and no attribution is required. For paid photos, I like iStock photos, create the market, and Getty Images. I actually haven't bought that many stock photos to use for mock-ups myself. Just one or two. If I pay, I tend to pay for ready-made mock-ups, that I know are from high-quality producers. So when you choose a photo, you need to look for some details that lets you know if it will make a great mock-up or not. Check the following features in the photo. One. Color object. The object in the photo that you want to place your octagon needs to be in one color, not pattern. The best is to find white objects light patterns, and black objects for dark patterns. However, you can change the color of the object, which you will learn more about later on in this class. Sharp photo. As your artwork is sharp, the photo needs to be sharp. Otherwise, it will look unrealistic when you place your sharp artwork in an unsharp or blurred photo. Texture. A mock-up looks best if the object have some texture, and isn't completely flat. Not too many details.The best photos are when the object is free from details. What I mean is, for example, no hair in the way, or other things that you might need to work very detailed around to make it look good. You can of course, choose to do that if you want to, but for me, I think it's just too time consuming, and the result might not always look good, and natural in the end. Lightning, and colors. A good photo has even lightning, and nice, appealing colors. Not all artwork will look good in every photo, depending on the colors of the photo, and the colors of the artwork. You will get the best result if you match the colors in the photo with the colors in your pattern, which we will talk about later in class. 5. Prepare your artwork: The first thing you need to do if you're using your own artwork for this class is to prepare your file so you can place it in a mock-up. I will go through how you do this with a pattern made in Adobe Illustrator. If you're using my original pattern, the example files that are attached in the class, you could just move on to the next lesson. The first thing we do is to open the photo that you are making a mock-up up and make a rectangle that covers the object where you will place your artwork. I make a square to cover the pillow where I will place my pattern later on. Copy the square with command C in Photoshop. Then we're heading to Illustrator and the file that you have the artwork in. Hit "Command V" and paste the square. Choose "Compound Shape". Now, you have a square with the right size, so that the JPEG file that we will create is the correct size to fill the object in your mock-up. Fill the square with your pattern or the artwork that you will use. Then you might want to save two different scales of the pattern. Go to "Objects" and "Transform" and "Scale". Maybe take down the scale to one of the patterns to 50 percent. This is totally optional, is just so that you can experiment later with scales of your artwork when we're making the mock-up. Sometimes I feel that it's just so much nicer to have everything prepared before I start with a mock-up so that I don't need to go back to Illustrator over and over again to make edits and new JPEG files. Next, open the asset export tool in the right tool panel or if you don't see it there go to Window and click "Asset Export". In the menu, select "Format Settings" to make the settings before you export. Here, I use JPEG 100, choose baseline, optimized and anti-alias art optimized. If you're making patterns and ever had a problem with white lines in your patterns, this is one of the solutions that are used to remove the white lines to save files as art optimize. I will show you what I mean. If you just copy the pattern from Illustrator and paste it in Photoshop, like we do here, you will often get these white lines. I know that it has something to do with anti-alias, but I don't know exactly why they exist. But what I do know is that they can be really annoying and they will print, if you save a JPEG with white lines and send it off to a printer. What you need to do to remove the white lines is the same to JPEG as art optimized. You can see that when I place my JPEG in Photoshop, instead of just copying the pattern from Illustrator, the white lines are gone. Even if I save this, to place it in a mock-up, you will see that there are no more white lines on the pillow. Let's head back to illustrator and save our files as art optimized JPEGs. First, drag both squares into the asset export tool. You can rename your files to maybe small and large. Then select both. Make sure that you have the format JPEG 100 chosen and I use scale one and suffix minus 100. When you made your settings, click on "Export" and choose where you want to save the file. Now, you have two JPEGs with your artwork in two different scales that you can experiment with in this class. If you want to use my artwork, I've attached three different color ways of my simple stripes pattern and they all have two different scales. Mostly I will use the large scaled ones in this class, but I've attached a smaller scale too, so that you can experiment for yourself and see what you prefer. Now you have everything set to join me and make the mock-ups alongside with me as you watch the class. 6. Simple placement: If you have everything set, either made JPEGs of your own artwork or downloaded my artwork from this class, then we're good to go. We will start with the basics in this lesson. How to create a mockup from a photo, with just a simple placement and a few simple tweaks to make it look realistic. Let's start with the bedroom photo, where we will place our artwork on the bedding. Open up the photo in Photoshop. The first thing we will do is to remove the little lock on the layer by just clicking once on it. Next, we will select the area of the photo where we will place our artwork. We will start with a pillow here. There are several ways to do this. I'm using the Magnetic Lasso Tool. I just find it so quick and easy to use. I'm just clicking once and we'll start in the end of the pillow, just moving along the edges to make the whole pillow one selection. It doesn't matter if it's a perfect selection around the edges because we can fix this later. Go to select, save selection, and then you can type in pillow. I usually save my selections because it can be so frustrating to go back and do it again and again if you lose it. You might have guessed that I learned this the hard way. Next, we will place our pattern on top of the pillow. To do that, I usually just drag in my JPEG file from the folder into Photoshop. I'm going to use the brown large one for this. Resize it so that it covers the pillow. The only thing that matters here is that it covers the whole pillow. Maybe something like this. Then hit ''Enter'' to place your artwork. Then we will make a smart object of our artwork. The reason we do this, is so that we can reuse the mockup over and over again. I will show you this later. For now, go to the menu in the layers panel. Make sure you have your objects selected and click on convert to smart object. You can't actually see that anything happens, but you just have to trust me on this one. When you made a smart object layer, choose the selection that you saved, go to select, load selection and choose pillow, and click ''Okay''. Now we have the selection on our object layer. We're really close to placing our pattern on the pillow. Click on the little rectangle with the circle in the layers panel to add a layer mask. I guess you can say that this cuts out the selection from your artwork. As you can see, it looks kind of flat and not at all blended in a photo. Make sure you have the layer mask selected and go to blending mode and change from normal to multiply. Now, that looks pretty good already, doesn't it? We have a few more details to fix before it looks great though. If you look at the edges, you can see that they might not be perfect. The pattern might be falling out or maybe doesn't cover the whole pillow. To fix this, make sure that you have your layer mask selected and then use the brush tool. Select the size and the hardness. I use hardness 100 percent and size 43 pixels here. Choose black as foreground color if you want to erase the artwork. So I will remove this that is outside of the edge of the pillow. Here you can see that the artwork is missing from the pillow. Then you can choose the white as the foreground color and add artwork in the layer mask with the brush tool, and the white selected. I am going over all of the edges of the pillow to see where I need to fill in or remove my pattern from the layer mask. I'm using the brush tool, I'm drawing in a layer mask with black to remove the pattern and white to add the pattern. When you fix the edges of the pillow, select the object instead of the layer mask in the layers panel and go to filter, blur, and gaussian blur. Click the little preview books. I don't know if you see it clearly here on my screen, but you should see it on yours. That a little bit of blur is added to the artwork. Give it a go and see how much blur you would like to add. What we're after here, is to make the pattern look realistic in the photo. I use 0.4 pixels and just click ''Okay''. We added a bit of gaussian blur. The last step, is to blur the edges, just a little bit to make it look even more realistic. Choose the blur tool in the left tool panel. Then I make sure I have my layer mask selected in the layers panel. I am taking down the size and the hardness of the brush a bit, before I click and drag around the edges of the pillow. I just want to blur a little bit here around the edges because as you can see in the photo, the pillow is actually a little bit blurred. What we want to do, is to match and blend in our artwork with the original photo. When you blurred the edges and you're happy with it, you are actually done with making your first mockup from a photo. This is the basic one, a simple placement of your artwork and a few small tweaks to make it look realistic. Let's have a quick look at how you place another pattern in this mockup. This is why we made the first step in the lesson. Created a smart object layer of your artwork. Double tap your smart object layer with your artwork. Here you have your artwork. The great thing is that you can paste another pattern here and save it and it will show directly in the mockup, including all the tweaks that you made earlier. I'm using the blue stripe pattern here. Dragging in the JPEG to Photoshop, hit command as to save, and then head back to our mockup file to see that the pillow is now covered in the new pattern. How amazing, isn't that? You can also head back to the smart or declave and try different scales of the pattern, to see how that would change the overlook in your mockup. The very last thing you need to do, is to save this as a PSD file. That way, you can just open your file and the layers will be there. You can reuse the mockup over and over again with new patterns, by placing them in the smart object layer. There you have it. You just made a simple placement mockup that you can use over and over again to showcase your artwork. 7. Perspective & texture: In some photos that you find, I want to make a mock-up of. The object might have a perspective, which means that if you place your artwork just flat in a photo, it will look unrealistic. In this class, I'll walk you through a few steps that will blend in your artwork on an object in perspective. In the end of this lesson, we will also add another technique to make your pattern blend in even more in the photo, and this technique is called displace Filter. But first things, first, let's open up our bedroom mock-up, and this time we will add our artwork on the cover. I don't really remember what it's called this part of the bedding, but I'm calling it cover in this lesson. The cover has a little bit of perspective, you can see that it tilts in to the room. The first thing we will do is to organize the file a bit, rename the pillow mock-up layer to Pillow, and name the background layer to just Background. To start, we will do the same first steps as we did on the pillow. Select the cover with the magnetic lasso tool, and just as last time, it doesn't need to be a perfect selection. We can go over and fix the edges later on. Just drag around and select the cover, and when you're finished, go to ''Select'', save selection and then name it Cover. Next step is to place your JPEG file with your artwork. To add your JPEG file, drag in the file, and I will place the brown large stripes pattern once again and place it over the cover. You can turn off the eye symbol on the pillow layers so that we can clearly see where we're placing our pattern on the cover. Now, make this layer to a smart object layer and then rename the layer to Cover. Well, it's time to place this pattern in a perspective so that it matches the cover. Go to edit and perspective warp. Click and drag over the area that you want to make in perspective. I'm dragging over my pattern here. Once you've chosen the area go to the top, to panel and choose ''Warp''. Here's a little trick to change the layers blending mode to multiply so that you can see both the pattern and the cover when you make the changes to the perspective. What we do now is to drag the pins, the corners of the square, to manipulate the perspective of our artwork. I'm just moving around the corners until I get an end result that I think will look good. Maybe something like this. When I'm finished, I select the move tool and click on ''Apply''. Next step is to choose your selection, go to ''Select'', ''Load selection'' and choose Cover. Once you have your selection, you can make a layer mask in the layers panel. Now you have your pattern in a perspective on the cover. I think this is so amazing. To compare, I made a layer here without the perspective. As you can see, the difference is huge as how realistic this mock-up look if you place the pattern in a perspective or if you just place it flat. I'm just going to throw away the sample layer, and let's continue with some tweaks to make it look even more realistic. Now we can do the same as we did with the pillow, we can go over the edges by selecting the layer mask and use the brush tool, draw with black to remove the pattern and with white to add the pattern in the layer mask. When you're happy with the edges, go to ''Filter'', ''Blur'' and ''Gaussian blur'' to add the overall blur to the cover. Then choose the blur tool and go over the edges of the cover. The last thing we will do to make this look even more realistic is to add a new technique, the displace filter. The displace filter will make the pattern move with the texture and the folds of the cover in a more realistic way. Just follow along and you'll see in the end result, what I mean. The first thing we need to do is to make a black and white photo of the original file. Open the original JPEG in Photoshop and click in the ''Adjustment panel'' on hue saturation and drag down the saturation so that the photo will become black and white. Then save the photo as a PSD file, and I will name it displace. Then what we will do is to place this displace filter. First make sure that you have your smart object layer selected. Then go to ''Filter'', ''Distort'', and ''Displace''. Choose ''Tile'', and ''Wrap around'', in the settings, and then hit ''Okay''. Then you choose your black and white photo and open. If we zoom in here now, you can see that the pattern has moved around the folds on the cover and has I guess you can say adapted to the texture on the cover. Now you can do the same with the pillow layer. Select the smart object layer, go to ''Filter'', ''Distort'' and ''Displace''. Choose ''Wrap around'' and ''Tile'' and your black and white image. Now we're finished with this, a little bit more advanced mock-up. You have placed your artwork in a perspective, and also learned how to make a displace filter, which makes the pattern move around the texture and the folds and the movements of the object in a photo. Save the file as a PSD file so that you can use it over and over again with new patterns and artwork. Once you're finished, joined me in the next lesson, where we will dive into what to do if you find a great photo but the object that you want to place your artwork on is another color than black or white. 8. Change the color of an object: Sometimes you find a great photo, but the color of the object that you want to place your artwork on isn't light. This photo of the baby is a great example. This is how we will look if you would try to place your artwork on the baby's outfit without changing the colors. Basically, not that good. To be able to use this photo, you need to change the color of the object before you make a mock-up of it. In this lesson, I will show you how to do that, as well as how to adjust the artwork so that it looks like it's moving with outfit, instead of being just a flat artwork placed on a photo. You will see what I mean later in this lesson. Open that photo of the baby and let's start with changing the color of the object. We will start the same way as the previous lessons. Select the Magnetic Lasso Tool, and make a selection around the jumpsuit. I don't know if this is really called jumpsuit, but let's just call it that in this class. I'm using the Magnetic Lasso Tool, I click once and then drag along the edges. If I make a mistake, I can always hit the back key once to go back one point in my selection. Here I made a little mistake. I'm just going to choose the add to selection in the top toolbar and continue to move around the jumpsuit with the Magnetic Lasso Tool and add to the selection to choose the whole jumpsuit in my selection. When you made the whole selection, you save it by going to select, save selection, and name it to jumpsuit. Then we go to the Layers panel menu and duplicate the layer just in case if you make any mistakes, so that you still have the original file to refer back to. I will just rename the layers to original and background. Next step is to load your selection and click on create new feel or adjustment layer in the bottom of the Layers panel. Unfortunately, you can't see this on my screen, but I click on gradient map here. Click on the color to edit the gradient, and choose a black to white gradient. You can experiment with how much white and black you want an a gradient. Basically the more white you choose, the more white to object will get. So I will say that you want to have as much white as you can without losing all of the shadows, which is what the black stands for. When you're happy with the result, click Okay, and as you can see, everything in your selection is included in the gradient mask. You probably still want to have the patterns brown here as it is in the original image. So select the brush tool and a smaller-sized brush and black as foreground color. Then draw with them, brush tool on the patterns to remove them from the mask and selection. Now we have changed the color of the object and we can continue with placing our artwork. This time, I think I'm going to try out brown small stripes. So I drag in the JPEG in Photoshop, re-size it to fit the jumpsuit and hit enter to place it. I rename the layer to jumpsuit, and then I convert it to a smart object layer, in the Layers panel menu. Load the selection and make a layer mask to cut out the selection from the artwork, change the blending mode to multiply. Now I can see that I'm not super happy with the gradient. So I go back to the gradient map and choose a gray color instead of the black, which will make the whole jumpsuit a little bit lighter. I actually don't like the small stripes on this mock-ups, so I just double-click my smart object layer and place the large brown stripe instead. Hit command S to save, and then I head back to edit the mock-up a bit more. Let's go over the details. First, fix the edges. My edges actually looks good here. So I don't need to fix them. But if you do, make sure that you have the Layer mask selected, go to the brush tool and use black color to remove an artwork, and white to add the artwork to the mask, just as we did in the previous lessons. What I will do here is to select the blur tool and blur that just a bit. I'm just moving over my edges to make them a little bit more blurry. Then I select the smart object layer, and I go to filter blur and Gaussian blur to add a little bit overall blur. My settings are 0.3. pixels here. Then I think I want to scale up the pattern a bit. I double-click the smart object layer and scale up the pattern and hit Command S to save. The next thing we will do is to try to add a little texture to the artwork, as it looks like, the fabric in the original photo has a little bit of texture. Our goal with mock-ups is always to make the artwork blend in as much as possible in the original photo. Go to filter, filter gallery, choose texture and texturizer select Canvas, and I use 52 percent scaling and relief one. Hit, okay. Let's have a look. Now that looks pretty good, doesn't it? The very last thing we will do is maybe the most important one to make the mock-up look as realistic as possible. If you have a look at the jumpsuit and your artwork, you can see that our artwork looks flat on top of that jumpsuit, and we would really like artwork to adjust to the movements in the fabric. To do this, unlink the smart object layer and the layer mask by clicking the little chain symbol. Then select the smart object layer and go to edit, transform and Warp. Now drag in the points and in the handles and try to make the pattern move in adjustment with the movement in the fabric. You can really experiment here and move around and see what looks good and not. When you're happy with the results, you can click the move to, to save the changes. Let's have a look at the difference without and with the work. This is really detailed changes, but it makes a lot of difference in the end result as far as how realistic the mock-up will look. So that was the last detail to fix in this mock-up, and we're finished with it. We have changed the color of the object using gradient map. We've added takes due to the artwork, and we used the warp tool to make the pattern move in adjustment with the movement in the fabric. Now all these steps might seem technical and complicated at first, and it might take a little practice to get a hang off. But I promised you that when you've done this a few times, it will get much easier, and basically, it's just a few steps that you need to learn to make a mock-up look this realistic. If you're finished and happy with the result, let's head over to next lesson where we will practice on editing the original photo just a little bit, and talk a little bit more about how the colors of the photo and the artwork affects the overlook of your mock-up. 9. Edit the photo & match the colors: In this lesson, we will do some minor editing in the original photo, and we will also talk a bit more about how the colors in a photo and your artwork affects the end result. Let's open up the photo with the surfboard and start with the editing. On this photo, maybe you want to remove the text on a board, as it might look a little bit unrealistic when you place the artwork on top of the text. You can edit this with many different tools in Photoshop. I will use my new favorite tool for this, which is the Spot Healing Brush Tool'' and I just click and drag over the text and watch it magically disappear. How amazing is that? Most of the time the spot healing brush tool works perfectly for my needs of editing spots and details in photos. Maybe I want to remove this little black thing at the back of the board as well. When I'm finished, I will save this as a JPEG file and will name number two and save it with large resolution and art optimized. Next, open the new JPEG file, and this is the one that we will start to make our mockup up. Basically we make the edits to the original photo, and then we save this as a new file and open the new file to start making the mock-up. Let's start with making a selection of the surfboard. Choose the ''Magnetic Lasso Tool'', and make a selection of the back of the board. Here I use the add to selection and remove from selection tool in the top toolbar with that laser tool to make the selection perfect around the edges. When I am finished with the back of the board, I choose add to selection option and add the front of the board to the same selection. When you have both the front and the back of the board in your selection, save the selection. Go to ''Select'', ''Save Selection'' and I'm naming my selection to surfboard. If you look closely, you will see that the surfboard is a little bit yellow, so I will change the color of it just a little bit and reduce the saturation to make it more white. So I click on ''Hue, Saturation'' in the adjustment panel and take down the saturation completely, which will basically make the board black and white. Sometimes it works to just take down saturation of the object and sometimes you need to make a gradient map like we did in the previous lesson. I think that as a rule, you can have that, the more white the object is from the beginning, the more likely it is that you only need to change the saturation rather than using a gradient map. For me, I just think that the saturation adjustment is so much quicker and easier, so if it works in the image, I rather choose that one. Next, we will merge these layers, so go to the ''Layers Panel Menu'' and ''Merge Layers'', and this was the last edit that we make to the original photo. Let's place our artwork, I will try out the blue large one for this. Dragging the JPEG and I think that I will rotate mine as it seems more likely that the pattern would be printed in that direction on this surfboard and it will just look so much better. Scale it so that it fits the board, hit ''Enter'' to place and then ''Convert to Smart Object'' layer and rename the layer to surfboard. Then we will load our selection, make a layer mask and choose ''Multiply'' as blending mode. Let's add a little bit of Gaussian blur, go to ''Filter'', ''Gaussian Blur'' and my settings are 0.5 pixels, hit ''OK''. Then let's blur the edges a little bit with the blur tool, just like we did in the previous lessons. Choose the blur tool and experiment a bit with the settings and click and drag around the edges to make them blend in more in this photo. Something that we haven't talked that much about in the previous lessons, is how the colors on the photo in combination with the colors of your artwork, affects how good and realistic a mockup will look. Basically, you want to match the colors of the photo with your artwork. Here you can see that, it looks okay with this blue pattern, but I think that this mockup would look even better with a pattern that has warmer colors. So let's try out the brown pattern and see if you can see any changes. For me, I think that this pattern looks much better in this photo, as the photo itself has a warm glow to it. Experiment a bit with this in different mockups and have a look at how different the artwork look in different mockups based on the colors in the original photo and the colors of your artwork. I would say that the mockup will look more realistic if you try to match the colors of the artwork with the colors in the photo. To make the next step, we will save this file as a PSD file and then open the edited JPEG, the one that we named number two. We will use it to displace filter again as we did in the perspective mockup in the previous lesson, so take down the saturation of the photo to make it black and white and then I save it as a PSD file. Then make sure that you have the smart object layer selected, go to ''Filter'', ''Distort'', and ''Displace'', tap in tile and wrap around and hit ''OK'', and choose your black and white PSD file. As you can see, the artwork moved a little bit and adapted to the movements and texture of the surfboard, which will make it look a little bit more realistic. I feel that this surfboard will look better with a large scale pattern, so I double-tap the smart object layer and scale up the pattern. Hit ''Command S'', and then head back to the mockup. Next, we will adjust the pattern a bit to better fit to the form of the board, so unlink the layers, make sure you have the smart object layer selected and go to ''Edit'', ''Transform'', and ''Warp''. Drag in the points and the handles to make the pattern move and fit the board a bit better. With this, I usually just experiment to see what would look good in a photo, maybe something like this would look pretty cool. Let's have a look at the difference before and after the warp tool. That's a huge difference, isn't it? I think that this looks really cool. There you have it, the surfboard mockup is finished. We have used the spot healing brush tool, the blur tool, Gaussian blur, the displace filter, and the warp tool. Let's dive into the next lesson where we will talk about what to do if your artwork has a dark background color. 10. Artwork with dark background: If you have a pattern or artwork with a dark background color, it won't look good if you place it on a white object. So for this, we need to find a photo where the object is black, like in this photo. Let's start with making a selection around the top with the Magnetic Laser Tool just as we did in the previous lessons. Don't forget to save your selection. Go to select "Save Selection" and name it to Top, then place the artwork. I will use the black pattern here. Drag in the JPEG and load the selection. Make a layer mask and then we will arrive to the first thing that is different from the previous lessons. So we can choose the blending mode Multiply here as the artwork won't show them. So instead of Multiply, we will choose Exclusion. I will then choose the brush tool and fix the edges and draw with black color to remove, and white to add my pattern in the layer mask. To make this look as real as possible, we need to be really detailed with the brush tool around the hands and the fingers here. Next step is to add a little Gaussian Blur. I will add 0.5 pixels blur here. Then we make a black and white version of the original photo just as we did in the previous lessons and we'll add a Displace filter. Then I will blur the edges with the blur tool and work really detailed around the hands and the fingers and try out different settings with the blur tool to see what makes this part look as realistic as possible. I will also use the brush tool and the layer mask and draw with black and change the blend mode to Multiply, to try to add a little shadow where the fabric meets the hand on the left side of the photo. Let's work the pattern a little bit so that it looks like it adjusts to the movements in the fabric. I'm experimenting here and dragging the points and handles to see what might look good. I think that I actually will remove the Displace filter in this one as it feels like it doesn't make that big of a difference and the [inaudible] kind of gives me the result that I'm after. The last thing I will try out is to add a little bit of shadow in the left corner as it feels like the area around that hand looks a little unrealistic. So I will use the Gradient tool and add a soft radial gradient that are gray to transparent in color. I will change the blending mode to Multiply and drag down the opacity. Yeah, I like the results, so I will keep that little shadow in my mock-up. Now this mock-up is finished and that's actually it. We made all of the different mock-ups in this class. So if you followed along with me, great job. If you find it really technical and hard, give it a little time and try out the different techniques a few times. Once you've practiced a bit and feel comfortable making your own mock-ups with all of these techniques, you can basically make a mock-up out of any photo that you find that has the right basic conditions. So let's head over to the next lesson which is a little bonus lesson where I talk about ready-made mock-ups and where to find the great ones. 11. Ready made mockups: Now you know how to make your own mockups. If you want to continue exploring mockups on your own and have a look at ready made mockups. I have a few tips that will make it easier for you to know where to start. I think that overall, the hardest part about mockups is to find the great ones. As I mentioned before, I spent a huge amount of time searching for good mockups in different places, which has led me to narrow it down to a few producers that I know for sure delivers high quality. Sometimes I still Google for free mockups for fun but I've already built up a large library to use. I've spent the time needed to be able to both use ready made and make high quality mockups. My absolute favorite site to buy mock ups are Creative Market, is just so easy to use and find great ones there. The producers that I buy most of my mockups from are Creatsy and Field Office Studio. Both have really high quality mockups that you won't be disappointed of. I also use the sites Pixeden, Pixelbuddha and Mockup World. All of these sites have both free and paid for mockups. Some of the best free ones I have are from these three sites. You could also have a look at Dribbble, Behance and GraphicBurger, where you can find some nice ones as well. Ready made mockups are usually very easy and quick to use. If you use the high-quality ones, the mockup files that you download will actually very much look like the ones we have created in this class. There will be one or several smart object layers where you paste in your artwork. Sometimes you can even change the color of the background or details of the object. The hardest part of all is to find the great ones, especially the ones that are free. 12. Thank you!: The class is finished and you learn just about everything that I know about making mock-ups. I hope you enjoyed watching the class as much as I enjoyed making it. I really loved mock-ups and I think it's a great way to showcase the artwork. Thank you so much for taking this class. If you have any questions, please ask them on the community page and be sure to share your class project.