How to Use Photoshop to Wrap an Image Around an Object

The Warp option of the Free Transform tool’s presets can be easily customized to wrap pictures in Photoshop. Photoshop’s capacity to wrap images around objects highlights their apparent three-dimensionality, which can add interest to your compositions. A circle created using the Shape tool and colored to look spherical, for instance, will look even more spherical when text is wrapped around it.

Open Photoshop and import the file containing the object you wish to surround with a picture. Load a PSD file of a sphere, for instance. For your first tries at wrapping, pick simple items because they are simpler to handle. Websites like Morgue File, Wikimedia Commons, and Stock vault include object photographs that are available without a copyright restriction.

From Windows Explorer, drag the image you want to surround the object with. Photoshop creates a separate layer for the image, which shows up in the Layers panel. To use the Free Transform Warp feature, select “Edit | Transform | Warp.”

Click the “Warp” control on the Options toolbar above the canvas to display a list of Warp presets for shaping your wrapped image. Select the preset that most closely resembles the item you want to wrap around. The “Bulge” and “Inflate” options are suitable selections for wrapping around a sphere.

Select “Custom” from the Warp control’s menu. This enables you to alter the preset you selected- shape. The image looks to fit the underlying object more closely as you click and move one of the points on the grid that surrounds the image. Drag the Free Transform grid’s points, for instance, to make the brick edges in the top half of the sphere bow upward and the brick edges in the bottom half bow downward, if you are wrapping a brick image to a sphere. Press “Ctrl” while dragging anywhere on the grid to shift the entire grid for better alignment without altering the individual grid points.

A list of blending modes will appear when you click the “Blending” mode list at the top of the Layers panel. To apply that mode to the wrapping image, select the “Overlay” choice. By allowing imagery from beneath layers to pass through, “Imagery in Overlay” mode essentially colors the imagery in those layers. As a result, the wrapping picture acquires the shading of the item it is wrapped around, giving the impression that the image is on the object’s surface.

How to apply text or an image to a bottle, cylinder, or other item-

Create the artwork you want to wrap around the 3D cylinder, duplicate it, change it to be utilized in an opacity map, and then arrange the 3D element on a picture to composite together.

So here are the fundamental steps I followed:

1) Select a new RGB document with a 1024 x 512 pixel background.

2) In 3D, select New Mesh from Layer, Depth Map, and Cylinder.

3) Switch to the 3D workspace.

4) Choose the material “Background” in the 3D panel.

5) In the Properties panel, pick “Remove Texture” from the Opacity texture pop-up menu.

6) Select the Diffuse texture pop-up in the Properties panel and click “Edit Texture…”

7) Add any label graphics that you want to bend around the cylinder here.

For the jar example, I utilized a text layer with a stroke layer style. In order to take into consideration the stretched UV mapping on the cylinder, you should also scale the width down by about 60%. If you utilize gray values instead of white in step 1, the scale factor will change.

8) After the artwork is exactly how you want it, choose Layer > Duplicate Layer to create a new file. This new file will be used for the Opacity texture, which removes the unnecessary cylinder while masking off the desired portion of the label (ie. die-cut label).

9) Choose every layer’s pixel and set it to white. Then, fill the black space on the layer below with a new layer. Your new Opacity map is shown below. Close the file after saving it to a working directory for use in the following step. Save and exit the step 6 and 7 artwork file as well (it is stored as a smart object in the original file from step 1)

10) Select the Background material once more in the 3D panel using the original file from Step 1 (with the 3D layer selected). Select the Opacity texture pop-up in the Properties window and then click “Load Texture…” Select “Open” and navigate to the opacity texture from step 9.

11) Look, you  just got your label artwork wrapping in a cylindrical shape. You can use the 3D Camera Rotate tool to view the various angles.

12)Bring in your jar image for compositing at this point. It can be challenging to align the scale and perspective by changing the 3D layer at this point. For this work, I aim to only use 3D camera tools (with global object scaling an exception). In order to visualize, I also employ the ‘Shaded Illustration’ Rendering preset.