Photoshop_User_June_2017

> PHOTOSHOP USER

>^ JUNE 2017

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USING THE DISPLACEMENT MAP

FOR PARTICLE EFFECTS

Since this issue focuses on special effects, I thought it would be fun to pull out one of Photoshop’s

more enigmatic tools and breathe some life into it. The most popular use of displacement maps (let’s

call them D-maps for short) is to distort and warp one image so it better fits the surface of some object

in another image, such as logos or text on T-shirts, or textures on faces. It’s a really easy way to

blend things in a natural way. Let’s take things further and build a popular dispersion effect using a

slightly hidden power of D-maps: channels.

3x3 Map showing before/map/after

SCOT TVALENTINE

Photoshop Proving Ground

The core concept of a D-map is that it uses gray values

to determine from where to copy pixels in your base

image: 50% gray means nothing moves around, while

100% (white) pulls image pixels from one direction, and

0% (black) pulls from the opposite direction. Typical

D-maps are grayscale images, where white on the map

copies from the lower right, and black copies from the

upper left.

Original D-Map Result

When you apply a D-map (Filter>Distort>Displace),

you get the following options: To control the Hori-

zontal and Vertical Scales by percentage; a choice of

stretching or tiling the D-map to fit your canvas; and

whether pixels at the edge of your image should be

repeated or taken from the other side (Wrap Around).

To make things more predictable for this article, we

won’t be using these options because our map will

be the same size as the original image. The percent-

age values are really handy, but they don’t affect the