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How to Place your Brilliant Designs on Any Photo! (a Photoshop Tutorial!)

March 29, 2016 by Beth Anne Schwamberger 1 Comment

Photoshop tips for beginners. This is such a fabulous post on how to put your designs onto any photo! Perfect for product sellers and Etsy sellers who love design but don't have time to take 100s of different product photos. | brilliantbusinessmoms.com

 Have you ever seen a gorgeous lifestyle photo and thought, “wow, it'd be so great if I could place my gorgeous designs into that scene!” Well, now you can!

Today I'm going to show you how you can take an image that you've found online – either for free or by purchasing one – and add your own designs to it. This concept works for T-shirt designs, graphic design prints, cards and invitations, notebooks, totes, or any number of other items where the bulk of the beauty lies in the graphic design work happening behind the scenes.

Since custom mug designs are all the rage, I'm using a mug photo as my example today. I like to source my free commercial-use images from Pexels.com. So I went to Pexels and then in the search bar I typed in ‘coffee mug’ and it returned lots of cute results.

Results like this where we have a steep angle are going to be too hard for you, if you're new to Photoshop to just do as your first project so I wouldn't recommend starting with something like this. Try to find an image where there's a coffee mug that's fairly straight head on, like this one.

Photoshop tutorial for Etsy sellers

I downloaded and saved that image, and then I opened up a new Photoshop file with it. Now I’m ready to add my design. It could be something created in another program like Photoshop, Illustrator, or Silhouette Studio. Or it could be typed up fresh, right in this new document.
The first time that you bring in your new design it's not going to be curved to shape the coffee mug, it's just going to be straight up and down so it's going to look something like this. We can see this is very much a square shape just sitting right on the mug.Put your Brilliant Designs on Any Photo
For this particular photo mockup, a straight non-curved design isn’t too bad laid right over the mug. You could probably get away with doing this. But there are a few things you can tweak to make it look better, like curving the text slightly to fit the shape of the mug. I won’t get into the nitty gritty of how to curve in Photoshop this time, but I want you to know that this is something that’s possible when you have the right tools and a little instruction. Right now we're looking at the plain square version.
If we curve the text slightly then it looks like this. It’s a subtle shift but if we don’t curve it, the eye will naturally pick up on how the image isn’t quite right. And if your design covers a larger area of the mug, it becomes glaringly obvious when the shape is wrong.3-curved-red-text_700
Once your design is placed, you can go in and do a few more things to blend it into the scene. I like to alter the overall color of the image by editing the hue and saturation. I’ve already created that layer – If I turn that on you'll see how the image overall changes.

hue_700

It just is a little bit more desaturated and looks a little bit more interesting instead of looking like I just tacked some red text on top of an image. Also notice that this coffee mug has a highlighted corner like the light is coming from the upper left. And there’s a shadow on the lower right of the mug.

To make the text fit in more naturally with this shading I went ahead and added another layer so the highlight is on top of the text instead of hidden underneath it. This looks way more natural.

highlight_700

One of the fancier things that I did to this template file is to use something called a Smart Object. This is a special layer, that when double-clicked, opens in a new tab. You can edit the image there, save it, and then the design is updated in the main image. So, when I made the shape that fits the mug I turned it into a smart object. My smart object shape fits the curve of my mug  so I can add anything I want in there and it will curve all by itself to fit the mug. If I didn’t have a smart object, then whenever I wanted to create a new mug mockup I’d have to use Photoshop to stretch and manipulate that new design to fit the curve. This is wasted time! Why fit the curve 30 times for 30 designs, when you can add 30 designs to a special layer that you only need to curve once? Time is money, right?! 😀
If I double click on the layer thumbnail for the smart object, then it opens in a new tab called ‘Layer One.psb’. If I make any changes here, like I'm going to color it blue, you'll see that up in the tab corner there's an asterisk, that means that I haven't saved the change that I just made.

4-asterisk_700

If I save the file then the asterisk goes away to show that it's saved. Then if I go back to the original file, you can see that it's now updated to be blue. Very, very easy.

5-curved-blue-text_700
Now, what if you didn't want this to show your design here. What if you wanted an actual pretty shape, design, or logo, instead? We can do that in this smart object too. I’ve pasted a second design (snagged from my Silhouette Studio Design software) into another layer. If I turn that layer on and hit save, then when we go back to our main image guess what's going to be there?

6-design_700
Yep, you got it! Here's our shape, sitting in the scene, curved slightly to fit the mug. The height and saturation are still turned on so it looks very natural, very nice, and this mockup is ready to go!

 

What do you think? Are you ready to create your own gorgeous mock-ups? I'd love to see what you come up with! Feel free to share them in the comments!


 

Sarah with her adorable family.

 

Sarah Guilliot is an expert in Photoshop mockups and beautiful images. She helps Etsy Shop Owners use their images to strategically sell more of their digital designs. You can find her at SarahDesign.com

Hear Sarah on our podcast!

Filed Under: Photography, Tutorial Videos Tagged With: design mockups, Etsy seller advice, How to add my design to any photo, Photoshop for Business, Photoshop for Etsy Sellers, photoshop tutorial, product mockups, Sarah Design, Sarah Guilliot

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