Making a mockup

Nov 23

Here’s a recap of how to mock up your shirt design on a photographed model. You might need to tweak these steps if you’re working with a dark shirt.

Find a good tee model. I’ll use a photo by Flickr user seventh.samurai from the Threadless Blank Tee Photos pool.
We’ll need a grayscale version of the model to make a displacement map. Open the model picture in Photoshop, select Image → Mode → Grayscale. Bump up the shadows by pressing ⌘L and moving the middle slider. Save this as a Photoshop document. Hang onto it for later.
Open the model image in Photoshop. Copy the Background layer and, using the polygonal lasso tool, select the t-shirt only.
Click “Add layer mask” at the bottom of the layers palette to mask out the model and background. Hang on to this layer for later.
If you need to change the shirt color, ⌘-click the shirt mask to load it as a selection. Click on the Background layer and press ⌘U for Hue, Saturation, and Lightness. Click the “Colorize” checkbox and play with the sliders to get the shirt color you want.
Open your t-shirt design. If it’s in Illustrator, select the design and copy it to the clipboard. If it’s in Photoshop, select all your design’s layers.
Paste your art into the model image in Photoshop as a Smart Object

(or, if the design’s in Photoshop, select its layers, press ⌘E to merge them, and drag the resulting layer onto the model image). Press ⌘T to change the size and placement.
Play around with blending modes for your design’s layer. Depending on the design colors and the shirt color, different blending modes will look better.
Select Filters → Distort → Displace. 3 is a good starting place for both settings.

Click OK, then select your grayscale model image. Your design should bend around the folds on the shirt a bit.
Now to add the shadows back in: drag your masked tee layer to the top and set its blending mode to Multiply. Adjust the opacity to taste.

There you go! Fancy model in your fancy design.