2torial Blog|photoshop tutorials, website design tutorials and graphic design articles and tutorials

In this tutorial we’re going to use the vanishing point filter and a displacement map to make the 2torial blog header banner appear like it was painted onto an old stone building years ago.  We’ll also use this filter to get rid of the two windows on the second story of our picture. Then we’ll use one other example of the displacement map on a brick wall using a slightly different variation of this displacement map tutorial. If you want to follow along with me, here are the resource files I’m using:

Brick Wall

Stone House

1. Vanishing point filter on the stone house.

Open the stone house pic in Photoshop as a layer, name the layer old house. Type ctrl +Alt +V to bring up the Vanishing point filter editor. When the editor first opens the “create plane tool” is active, use the tool to trace around the 4 corners of the front wall. If you need to, you can zoom in close to get the best fit you can.

Lets get rid of the top two windows so we can fit our banner there.  While still in the vanishing point editor, type M to bring up the rectangular marquee tool and draw a square to the left of the top right window slightly wider and longer than the window itself.

Notice how the marquee tool draws the rectangle in the proper perspective.  In the upper tool bar, set Heal to on then Hold down alt + shift at the same time and click +drag a copy of the selection over the top of the right window and release. hit ctrl + D to deselect. This makes some pretty good patch work of the wall.

Use the same technique to patch over the top left window.

To give the banner that we’ll put on the house a sense of depth and detail, we’ll use a displacement map. To prepare the displacement map for the scene,  copy a duplicate of the newly edited house to a new Grayscale document the same size as the original. Apply a Guassian blur, filter>blur>Gaussian Blur, with a radius of about 1.5 pixels and then save the document as house_displace.psd.

Now we can open our banner in Photoshop. If you have your own logo or banner, open it up in Photoshop as a layer, if your following along with me you can right click on my header and save the image and use that one. Once you have your banner open in photoshop, if its not a layer, double click on it in the layer palette to turn it into a layer then ctrl +click the thumbnail in the layer palette to make a selection around the banner. Go to edit>copy to copy the selection into the clipboard. Now, go back to our original document with the stone house. Create a new layer on top of the house layer by clicking the appropriate icon at the bottom of the layer palette and name it banner. With the banner layer selected type ctrl +alt +V to open the vanishing point filter again. Once in the vanishing point editor, type ctrl +V to copy the banner into the editor (it appears in the top left corner).

If your using my banner you’ll have to use the transform tool by typing T to scale it down a little so it will fit on the side of the house. Drag the banner down into the vanishing point box and you’ll notice it snaps to the proper perspective. line it up where you want it and hit ok.

Set the blending mode of the banner layer to overlay. To add the displacement map to the scene, with the banner layer still active, go to filter>distort>displace  keep the horizontal and vertical scale at 10 and hit ok, then select house_displace.psd. Back in the layers palette, set the opacity of the banner layer to about 50% and that’s it!

Final: (click for larger view)

2. Displacement map example 2

This will be a rather quick example of another displacement map against a brick wall. Open the brick wall pic in Photoshop. name the layer “brick wall” in the layers palette.  To make the displacement map, we’ll use the same technique from above. Copy a duplicate of the brick wall to a new Grayscale document and apply a Guassian Blur with a radius of 2.0 pixels.

Open your logo or banner (in this case  I’m using a state flag from Washington so I’ll refer to the layer as “flag”) and drag it into the brick document. Position it were you want.

Now, duplicate the brick wall layer and drag the copy above the flag layer. Set the blending mode of the brick layer copy to hard light. Select the flag layer again and apply the displacement map to it, filter>distort>displace.  Set the opacity of the brick layer copy to about 80%.  That’s it. Hope you enjoyed.

Final 2 (click for closeup)