Create Realistic T-Shirt Graphics

YOU’LL NEED THIS ADOBE PHOTOSHOP Subscribe to various packages

at www.adobe.com. A LOGO Plus, an image of someone

wearing a T-shirt. GETTING YOUR LOGO on to a T-shirt to be worn by the bright young things of our new American century is a great way to build a brand. But how to get them to wear it? Stick it on your shop front, of course. And you don’t have to go to the trouble of making a T-shirt and paying a model to wear it for you. Using Photoshop, you can make your logo fit every wrinkle of the fabric caused by your model’s insouciant slouch, and reflect every shadow cast by the lighting. We’re using Photoshop CC, but it’s a fairly straightforward process, involving layers and blending, so could potentially be done in other apps, such as Affinity Photo or the cut-down Elements release of Photoshop, too.

When you’re done, no one will be able to tell that you didn’t photograph a real shirt. Of course, first you’re going to need a logo, and that’s an entirely different forest full of bears... For now let’s just stick to the T-shirt. –IAN EVENDEN 1 GET YOUR LOGO ON A T-SHIRT So first, create your logo. We’ve drawn a quick “Minimum BS” logo in Photoshop, really taking advantage of the program’s power, but obviously yours will be much better. We also tried it with a line of text—a perfectly workable choice if you can’t draw. Place the logo on your T-shirt image in any way that preserves its transparent background, so save it out as a PNG and place it, or export the layers as a Smart Object, and import this into your composition file [ Image A]. Make sure it’s too big, so you can shrink it into place—it’s always better to do this rather than subsequently making something bigger, to retain quality. Once it’s there, use “Edit > Free Transform” to shrink the logo, and rotate it into position if needs be. If your model is at a slight angle to the camera, you may need to add a bit of perspective by using “Edit > Transform > Perspective” or “Skew,” to make the part of the logo nearest the camera slightly larger. You can duplicate and then hide its layer before you start, making a backup copy in case you later decide you’ve made it too small. If you’re using text as your logo, leave it in vector form until you’ve finished resizing it, before hitting “Rasterize Layer,” as this keeps the quality high. 2 COPY THE SHIRT We’re going to need a copy of the T-shirt, too, so select it to separate it from the rest of the image. There are a few ways to do this, especially if it’s a simple area of flat color with high-contrast edges: You can use the Quick Selection or Magic Wand tools; you can run the Magnetic Lasso around the edge; or if, like us, you were first shown how to do this using Photoshop 5 by someone who had been trained on even older software, you can use the Pen tool, and lay a vector path around the edge, before loading it as a selection from the Paths palette. This has the advantage that you can save the path and use it as a backup, but there’s nothing wrong with doing it the other ways if you prefer. 3 TIDY UP THE SELECTION To clean up your selection, it was once common to use “Refine Edge.” However, this useful tool has vanished in the latest release of Photoshop CC, replaced on the “Select” menu by “Select and Mask” [ Image B]. Play with this until you’re happy with the selection. One minor benefit of using the Pen tool to create a selection is that you get long, smooth curves, rather than a lot of tricky switchbacks, so there’s less to smooth out. When you’re happy with your selection, save it, make sure the T-shirt layer is selected, and not any imported logo layers, and copy the selection to a new layer (“Layer > New > Layer

via Copy”). Add a Layer Mask by making sure you have the right layer selected, then hitting the button at the bottom of the Layers palette that looks like a black rectangle with a white circle in it. This allows the rest of the image to show through, only applying the effect inside the selection. 4 SHADOW PLAY This new layer is going to become the wrinkles. Use Levels (“Image > Adjustments > Levels”) to darken the dark bits and lighten the light bits, by moving the outer triangles toward the highest part of the histogram. You want an exaggerated, highcontrast end result. Avoid clipping—the mushing of shadows or highlights to pure black or white respectively—as much as you can, because this would mean your shadows appear abruptly, rather than gradually fading to their darkest. 5 ADD SOME REALISM Make sure this wrinkle map layer is on the top of the stack in the Layers palette, followed by your logo, then the base model-in-shirt layer. Change the blend mode of the topmost (wrinkle map) layer to “Multiply”—this darkens the colors below it, so your T-shirt becomes darker, but it allows the texture of the fabric to show through. Leave the logo layer on “Normal” blend mode, but reduce its opacity to around 85 percent. This helps blend it into the cloth background, making it look printed, rather than just floating in front. We’ve also added a bit of grungy noise to ours, using the Mezzotint filter (“Filter > Pixellate > Mezzotint”) [ Image C], so it looks as though the transfer has started to peel slightly, but that’s not a necessary step if your composition isn’t going to be looked at very closely. If you’ve used a text layer, you need to rasterize it before doing this. 6 PUT IT ON DISPLAY When you’re happy with the way it looks, finish up by flattening the layers, and exporting as a JPEG or PNG file, ready for use on a website [ Image D].