Displacing Textures

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Displacing Textures

You can see the result above. If it’s taken a long time to load in your browser, this should be a lesson to you. Don’t use heavy textures in images intended for the Web.
     A close up look at two samples of the textured arrow, above, will show you what the Displace filter did. This shows the top of the bottom end of the arrow.

As you can see, it makes the ‘fabric’ appear to be wrapped around the shape. Here is another bit of detail. This is the tip of the arrow.

Reversing the lighting should make the shape appear to be pressing into instead of out of the fabric, though this can be tricky. To do this, you would use a minus figure in the Displace filter (-5, instead of 5), and deselect ‘White is High’ in Lighting Effects. You may also need to darken the arrow or change its blend mode to convince the eye that it is retreating and not advancing.
     You can now delete the white arrow layer, Shape 1, in the illustration below. Try also deleting the green textured layer, Layer 1, below.

This will leave you with the arrow, alone, all wrapped in burlap. The Layers palette looks like this:

and the image looks as shown at the very bottom of this page. I didn’t add the shadow—it’s a byproduct of the procedure.

[The following update was added August 2, 2001.]
I was sent an excellent tip by Helge Hansen on a better, though somewhat more complicated way to apply Lighting Effects. Below, you will find an outline of the technique. It requires a layer mask, so be sure you have read the Layer Mask tutorial and know how to apply one to your image.
     Use the steps described above to get the texture layer displaced. This should be as far as the bottom of page one of this tutorial. You can delete the white arrow layer; we won’t be using that.
     Use the techniques described in the Layer Masks tutorial to add a layer mask to your texture layer.
     After you’ve added the mask, open the displacement map document that you created on page one. In that document, choose Select > All followed by Ctrl-C, or Edit > Copy. Click on the texture document to make it active. Press the Alt key, and click on the layer mask icon to put the mask in edit mode. The paintbrush icon to the right of the eyeball will change to the mask icon which is a white circle on a gray background. (Note that I used a blue colored texture in this illustration.)

With the mask in edit mode, press Ctrl-V, or choose Edit > Paste. Then press Ctrl-D to deselect if necessary.
     Click on the image icon to put the layer back in image edit mode. The paintbrush, will reappear in the box to the right of the eyeball and you will be able to see your texture again.
     With the texture layer selected, choose Filter > Render > Lighting Effects. Use lighting settings as described earlier, but in the Texture Channel menu pick the Mask option. Its name will vary according to the effect you used to create your layer mask, but the word Mask will be a part of it. I used the Ripple Frame effect to create my layer mask, so my option was called Ripple Mask.

     Once you’ve applied your Lighting Effects filter, go back to the texture layer, and Alt-click on the layer mask icon again to put the mask into edit mode. Press Alt-Backspace to fill the mask with white, or choose Edit > Fill and choose White from the menu.
     Click on the image icon to see the results. In this instance, there is not that much difference in the results between the two techniques. However, using a layer mask/alpha channel gives you huge advantages for creating more complicated effects. You are very limited in what you can do using layer transparency in Lighting Effects.

A quick and dirty way to get an alpha channel into the Lighting Effects menu is to apply the Cut Out effect found in the Effects Browser.
     You need to do this at the very beginning, before you add your texture since the first step of the Cut Out effect is to flatten the image, if there are any layers.
     To use this technique, proceed as follows. Create your new document. Make a selection in the shape that you want on your alpha. Use the lasso tool, or any other selection technique. Blur or feather if you wish. Then apply the Cut Out effect. After you create more layers, double click on the layer that has the Cut Out effect, rename it (to make it not a background layer) and delete it if you like. Or you can just turn off its visibility.
     After you’ve created your alpha channel, proceed as instructed in this tutorial, through the end of page one. At that point, you can simply apply the Lighting Effects filter using the channel that you’ll find in the menu called Cutout. This method is fast, but it gives a very harsh effect. The alpha you get from the Cut Out effect is black and white (with some blurring, if you applied it) rather than gray and white, and so is very abrupt.
     

back to Elements Tips

[Not on the .pdf—the Ctrl-J shortcut for duplicating a layer or selection contents to a new layer is disabled in Elements 2. Use Layer > New > Layer via Copy instead.]
If you would like to download a zipped pdf file of this tutorial, please click on the link below and save it to your hard drive.
Displacing Textures pdf
205 KB
If you don’t know how to expand a zipped file or use Acrobat Reader, download the file, above, and then go here to find instructions

Copyright © 2002 by Jay Arraich.
All rights reserved.
All photographs copyright ©2002 by Jay Arraich
jay@arraich.com