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All Arenas \ Photo Effects \ Photo Effects Advanced
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Gavh said 5 years ago 10/6/2006 4:50:13 AM EDT

Many people feel in the dark when it comes to displacement maps. This is my take on them: Think of it like taking a piece of cloth and wrapping it around and object. The cloth being the texture/pattern (carbon fiber) and the object being the map (the leopard). We are going to take a carbon fiber pattern and wrap it around the leopard. You need to experiment with your settings in this section

We start off with our picture of the leopard:



Ctrl+A+C selects the whole picture and copies it. Now click File/New and create a new image. Click OK. You now have a blank document with the dimensions of the leopard picture. You will see why we do this step in a bit, so hang tight

Go back to the leopard picture and mask out the leopard (dont worry about the whiskers). Be sure to subtract the eyes and nose from the selection



Now copy the selection and paste it in the blank document you created earlier. (1) Desaturate the leopard and save as: desaturated leopard.psd (we need the layer here for when we create the displacement map later). We now have the start of our displacement map. Now imagine a white leopard statue. It will have no spots or fur, just the contours of a leopard (light and dark shades). This is what we need. So in order to do this we need to get rid on the fur and spots(2)Click Select/Color range. Click on a spot to select the black in the picture and set the fuzziness to 100, click ok (the black in the picture is now selected). Now select a 50% gray from your swatches palette and using the paint bucket tool set at 255 tolerance, fill the spots




(3) Now deselect. Now click Filter/Blur/Gaussian blur and set it to about 7 pixels (experiment with this setting). You now have a rough idea of the contours of the leopard. I then upped the contrast by +30 to increase the definition of the contours.



Now for the tricky part:

(4) Using the smudge tool set at 75% strength blend your contours Try imagining where light and shadows will fall. See the bulge of the jaw line, eye socket, leg muscles; try and accentuate these areas. Your leopard now looks like a smeared painting... COOL! But it needs to be smooth. (5) So again we go to your Gaussian blur and set it high till the image looks smooth (mine was 17 pixels). And there you have it. We now have our Displacement map Now save as: leopard displacement map.psd.