Photoshop Fundamentals: Blend Images with a Displacement Map

Adapted from Photoshop CS4: Top 100 Simplified Tips & Tricks (Wiley Publishing)
By Lynette Kent
Dateline: August 17, 2009
Version: Adobe Photoshop CS4

You can paste one image onto another and blend the pasted image into the Background layer by changing the blend mode. The layer blending modes control how the colors in the top image combine with the pixels in the underlying image. They do not affect the texture of either image. To make the top image blend into the texture of the base image and make the final image appear more realistic, you can use the Distort filter and a special file called a displacement map.

A displacement map is a grayscale version of an image saved as a Photoshop file. The Displace filter then uses the displacement map essentially as an applied texture. The black areas are the low points and the light areas are the high points of the contours of the original image.

You create a displacement map of the background image and save it as a Photoshop file. Then you apply the Displace filter to the second image to be placed of top of the background image. You'll need two images to work through the following tutorial on Graphics.com.

Commenting on this Blog entry is closed.