How to bend a logo onto an image realistically in Photoshop
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Overview
By the end of this course you'll posess super skills!
- Learn the skills to mask anything… including the dreaded hair.
- Using your amazing new masking skills, you will be able to clearcut images.
- You will learn how to make type interactive.
- Together we will look at popular current visual styles and learn the tools and tricks necessary to recreate them.
- There is a fun section where you will learn how to distort, transform and manipulate images.
- We will create our own graphics using simple techniques from scratch.
- I will teach you to retouch photographs like a professional..
- Finally - any good Photoshop user should know how to put an island inside a bottle!
There are exercise files available to download so that you can follow along with me in the videos. There are lots of assignments I will set so that you can practice the skills you have learned.
Course duration 8 hours 35 mins + your study.
Get the completed files here.
Awarded the Best Photoshop Course by Learnopoly in 2023
Daniel Walter Scott
Founder of Bring Your Own Laptop & Chief Instructor
I discovered the world of design as an art student when I stumbled upon a lab full of green & blue iMac G3’s. My initial curiosity around using the computer to create ‘art’ developed into a full-blown passion, eventually leading me to become a digital designer and founder of Bring Your Own Laptop.
Sharing and teaching are a huge part of who I am. As a certified Adobe instructor, I've had the honor of winning multiple Adobe teaching awards at their annual MAX conference. I see Bring Your Own Laptop as the supportive community I wished for when I was first starting out and intimidated by design. Through teaching, I hope to bring others along for the ride and empower my students to bring their stories, labors of love, and art into the world.
True to my Kiwi roots, I've lived in many places, and currently, I reside in Ireland with my wife and kids.
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Downloads & Exercise files
Transcript
Hi there, in this video we are going to look at kind of bending, distorting, and skewing. We're going to try and lay it down on the ground and then kind of morph it around the shoe here. So it looks like it's kind of following the curve. Let's do that now using Adobe Photoshop's Transform Tools.
Let's open up the file we're going to be working with, 'File', 'Open'. We're working in the 'Exercise Files' in this folder called '08 Transform'. Open the one called 'Transform 01'. So we want to mock up this logo on this. Let's look at the basics for transforming first. We'll go and add the logo, so to bring in the image I can open it, copy and paste it, which we've been doing for a lot of this course. I'm going to show you another way. 'File', there's one that says 'Place Embedded'. Go to that same folder and open up 'Logo.ai', click 'Place'. It's going to put it into the Smart Object automatically because it knows it's an ai file and it goes, "You're vector, you should be Smart Object." And we're totally down with Smart Objects now.
All we need to do is give it a size, and then hit 'Return' because it's kind of stuck in this kind of limbo mode. Can you see now, these things work. So if I hold down 'Shift', and we can scale it down. Scale it down to something appropriate like that, hit 'Enter'. What we're going to do is, we'll start with one copy just up here. We're going to duplicate the logo, right click. 'Duplicate Layer'. This is going to be called 'Logo 02'. We'll move it down, and let's look at the basics for transforming.
Let's go to 'Edit', 'Transform'. We've dealt with Scale Before and Rotate Before. And some of the other easy ones that you might use is Rotate Clockwise, Counter clockwise. We'll go back the other way. You can flip it 180, which flips it completely upside down. Another one in there you might use is Flip Horizontal and Vertical. It's not going to really work in this case if I go Horizontal. Backwards logo, but it's good to know where that's kept. I'm going to undo.
Next thing I want to do is I want to kind of bend it down the bottom here like we saw in the intro on the floor. And under 'Edit', 'Transform', you can see, a bunch of these are grayed out. Remember in the last video where we talked about Smart Objects, and most things work with it except for the very first thing we're going to do in this course after we've learned to convert everything to the Smart Object, because Distort, Perspective, and Warp don't work. And those are the ones we want to learn.
So remembering how to convert it from a Smart Object back to regular layer, is right click 'Logo', and say, I would like you to be a 'Rasterized Layer'. Nothing much changes except that little icon's gone, and magically, 'Edit', 'Transform', these things appear. Now I never use Skew, I'll save you the trouble of testing it because it just does this. I'm not sure when you'd use that, or at least I don't use it, so I'm going to hit 'Esc'. Is the kind of "I didn't mean it" button, 'Esc' on my keyboard.
The ones that I do use, we're going to use say, Distort first, I love this one. It's really good for mocking up, like signs that you've made on to real objects. So this one here, I'm just going to, kind of clicking anywhere about the center, moving it down here. And what you do is grab the corners, and it's kind of like in this weird flat plane that you can start manipulating. Now it's not going to match the background automatically. So there's a lot of just, you having a look. I'm doing it right now by-- kind of got, I don't know why I close one eye when I'm doing it. It seems to help with my perspective. Does that look like it's on the ground? Ah, that's good enough. When I'm ready, hit 'Enter'. You could fake a sign for a billboard, or say you've mocked up a cover of a magazine, you can have a picture of a magazine. Bring in your, say InDesign cover ideas, and mock it up using that Distort.
Now the next one I want is, I'm going to duplicate Logo again. And we look at Warp, right clicking it, 'Duplicate Layer'. 'Logo 3'. Remember, right click it, and say you have to be a Rasterized Layer; sorry, buddy. I'll move it down to kind of roughly where I want it. I'm going to get it down to a rough size, I'm using 'Edit', 'Transform', 'Scale'. Now we're going to use the 'Edit', 'Transform', and we're going to use this one called 'Warp'. I'm going to zoom in a bit, and show you how it works. It's a little weird. Grab one of the corners, click, hold, and just give it a wiggle. Kind of turns it more like fabric, whereas the last one made it like a block. Made it like a sheet that you could kind of manipulate.
This one here is a lot more-- Warp here is a lot more kind of elastic. It's more like a sheet of paper, so I can move it around. So there's two parts to it, there's these corners, they're called Anchor Points. So the edge of this image has to go to that Anchor Point wherever it is. These other little things here called handles are the way that the line gets influenced. You can see, nothing actually has to pass through this little black dot but it's kind of like gravity, kind of like distorts the line before it hits the Anchor Point. So just know, every Anchor Point here has two handles. There's a top one, and the bottom one.
Now it's the same principle again. There's a lot of just kind of like dragging it around, saying okay, I feel like that's the bottom. Trying to get the perspective lining with the bottom of that shoe there. And then, see these two little handles here. I'm just trying to disorder it to make it feel like it was following the kind of path. I have it up a little bit there. It's up with these little wavy lines to follow, but same with this one here. You can see, it kind of doubled back on itself, so I want it about there, but then I have to adjust these lines. It's a lot of messing around. Just getting a feel for it, this bottom one here.
It's a little hard to see some of these dots. I shouldn't have picked a stripy shoe. If you're practicing with me, you're cursing the stripy shoe. You're probably cursing the shoe theme throughout this whole course. I hope you're not getting too bored of it but I went with a shoe theme. So what am I doing now? I'm just kind of messing around, trying to get it to flow. Can you see, the lines in the center here, kind of bit weird. You can actually just click and drag these as well, any of these points in here, because we kind of fixed the outside.
Now we just need to kind of drag the inside and make it feel like it was part of it. Good. It's okay. All right, I'm going to stop there, because you're just watching me do this. I could be at it for a while, hit 'Return' when you're ready. Zoom out, and you've got something kind of bent around the shape. I haven't done a great job. One of the things that make it super obvious is that the colors are just super strong and don't have any of this kind of-- they're not interacting with the background very much.
So we've looked at this before, remember, Blending Modes? So on my logo 3, it's this layer here, turn the Eyeball on and off. Up where it says Normal, remember we've played around with a few of these. We're going to look at Multiply, and that kind of works. It's kind of cool, maybe a bit strong. You just work your way through all these options to find one that you feel works good with your shoe and your image, and your background color. I was playing around with this. What looked good? Linear Light, I think it did. Kind of like the Linear Light, changed the color quite a bit of my graphic, so maybe that's not what I want. Maybe that's a bit closer, and I really want to go back and fix this because it doesn't look very realistic.
So I hope you got an understanding of some of those Transform Tools. I don't use them all. Some of them are just a bit weird, like Perspective, just use Distort. Quicker and easier, in my opinion. Last little things I'll throw in at the end here are Image, and sometimes Image Rotation, instead of doing it per layer you can do the whole thing. Remember, we looked at rotating it clockwise, just the particular layer. This does the whole graphic, same with flipping it. So if you want to flip this across the whole thing, rather than just a particular layer. Plus it was rotating there, 'Image'. Image Rotation, and there's a few little things in there to work with. That's where they're hiding. All right, I will see you in the next video.
How do you make a logo follow the shape of an object in Photoshop?
Use Edit > Transform > Distort to fit a logo onto a flat surface in perspective, or Warp to bend it around a curved object. Position and scale the artwork first, adjust its shape to match the photograph, then try blending modes so it interacts with the surface underneath.
Mocking Up a Logo in Photoshop: Distort, Warp and Transform Tools
Key takeaways
Place a logo into your photograph and keep an untouched copy for other mock-ups.
Use Distort to make artwork look as though it sits on a floor, sign or magazine cover.
Use Warp’s corners, handles and interior controls to follow a curved surface.
Test blending modes to help the logo feel part of the photograph.
Know when you are transforming one layer versus rotating or flipping the whole image.
A logo dropped onto a photograph usually looks exactly like that: a logo dropped onto a photograph. It needs to follow the angle of the surface, bend where the object bends, and interact with the image underneath.
We’ll use a shoe photograph for two different treatments. One copy of the logo will lie flat on the ground beside the shoe. Another will bend around its side. The useful distinction is simple: Distort handles the flat plane; Warp handles the curve.
1. Open the photograph and place your logo
If you are working with the exercise files, choose File > Open, go into the 08 Transform folder, and open Transform 01.
You could open the logo separately, copy it and paste it into the photograph. Here’s another way that is handy to know:
Choose File > Place Embedded.
Find the Logo.ai file in the same exercise folder.
Click Place.
Scale the logo down to a sensible starting size.
Press Enter or Return to confirm the placement.
Photoshop brings this Illustrator artwork in as a Smart Object. That is a useful starting point for the logo.
Don’t forget that last confirmation. While the placement transform is still active, Photoshop can feel as though it is stuck in limbo, with other controls unavailable. Give the artwork its initial size, then press Return.
Move this first logo into the upper corner of the canvas, out of the way. We’ll keep it there as the original and work on duplicates.
2. Get familiar with the basic transform options
Right-click the logo layer in the Layers panel and choose Duplicate Layer. Call the duplicate Logo Two, then move it down onto the photograph.
With that layer selected, open Edit > Transform. Alongside Scale and Rotate, there are a few useful shortcuts:
Rotate 90° Clockwise: turns the selected layer a quarter turn to the right.
Rotate 90° Counter Clockwise: turns it a quarter turn the other way.
Rotate 180°: turns it upside down.
Flip Horizontal: mirrors the layer from left to right.
Flip Vertical: mirrors it from top to bottom.
Flipping this particular logo horizontally makes it backwards, so it is not what we want for the mock-up. Still, it is worth knowing where the command lives. Undo the flip before carrying on.
If the transform commands are greyed out
In the Photoshop setup used for this exercise, Distort, Perspective and Warp are unavailable on the placed Smart Object. If you encounter that restriction, right-click Logo Two and choose Rasterize Layer.
The artwork will look much the same, but the Smart Object icon disappears from its layer thumbnail. Open Edit > Transform again and check that the commands are available.
We are doing this on a duplicate, so the original placed logo remains separate.
What about Skew and Perspective?
Skew lets you slant the artwork. Give it a quick try if you like, then press Escape to cancel the experiment. Think of Escape as the “no, I didn’t mean that” button while a transform is active.
I don’t tend to use Skew for this sort of mock-up. Likewise, although Perspective is in the menu, my preference here is Distort. I find it quicker and easier to position the corners where I need them.
3. Use Distort to lay the logo on the ground
Distort is great for fitting a design onto a flat surface in a photograph. You manipulate the corners while the artwork behaves like a flat sheet.
Select Logo Two.
Choose Edit > Transform > Distort.
Drag inside the artwork to move it onto the ground beside the shoe.
Drag the corner points to change its angle and apparent depth.
Keep adjusting until the logo looks as though it lies on the same ground plane.
Press Enter or Return to apply the transform.
Photoshop does not automatically match the background perspective here. You have to judge it against the photograph. Move a corner, look at the result, and adjust another. There is a fair bit of squinting involved. I apparently close one eye when I do this, which seems to help!
Distort lets us angle the second logo so it appears to lie on the ground
This is useful for much more than shoes. You can place a sign design onto a photographed billboard, or bring in a magazine cover concept from InDesign and fit it onto a photograph of a magazine. The principle is the same: move the corners until the artwork matches the photographed surface.
4. Use Warp to bend the logo around the shoe
Now duplicate the original logo again and call this copy Logo Three. Rasterise the duplicate if needed for the transform commands in your setup.
Move it roughly onto the side of the shoe, then use Edit > Transform > Scale to get its size close. Confirm that adjustment before choosing Edit > Transform > Warp.
Zoom in so you can see the shoe’s shape and the controls more clearly.
Where Distort feels like moving a rigid, flat sheet, Warp feels more like working with flexible fabric. You can bend the edges and adjust the artwork inside them.
Understand the corners and handles
There are two important controls to get comfortable with:
Anchor points: the corner points that fix where the artwork’s corners sit. The edge has to reach that point.
Handles: controls that influence how the edge curves as it approaches an anchor point. The edge does not have to pass through the handle itself.
Think of a handle as having a bit of gravitational pull on the curve. Moving it changes the direction and shape of the edge rather than simply relocating the corner. In this warp setup, each corner has two handles influencing its adjoining edges.
Shape the outside first
Start by dragging the corners into position. Use the bottom of the shoe as a guide for the logo’s lower edge, then adjust the handles so the artwork follows the curve of the side panel.
Make small changes and keep looking at the whole shape. If an edge doubles back on itself or develops a strange bend, adjust its handle rather than trying to fix everything by moving the corner.
The logo’s edges need to follow the shoe’s shape rather than remain a perfect rectangle.
This takes a bit of fiddling. The striped fabric does not make those tiny controls particularly easy to see, either. It is not the most forgiving shoe I could have picked!
Then adjust the inside
Once the outer shape is reasonably close, look at the logo itself. The boundary might fit the shoe while the artwork in the middle still feels stretched or awkward.
You can click and drag within the warp area to adjust the interior. Use that to make the graphic flow with the surface, rather than only fixing its outside edges.
Work between the corners, handles and interior until the result feels convincing. Then press Enter or Return and zoom out. A close-up is useful for adjustments, but the full composition makes it easier to judge whether the logo belongs there.
5. Try blending modes to connect the logo with the fabric
Even with a reasonable warp, the logo can still look pasted on. In this example, the strong colour is a giveaway: it does not interact much with the fabric underneath.
Select Logo Three in the Layers panel. If you are unsure which layer it is, toggle its eye icon off and on. Then open the blending mode menu, which initially reads Normal.
Try a few options and judge them against your particular image:
Multiply: gives a useful first result here, although it can look a little strong.
Linear Light: produces an interesting effect, but changes the graphic’s colour quite noticeably.
Hard Light: is another option worth testing and feels closer to the intended result in this example.
Multiply is a useful test, though the darker result may be stronger than we want.
There is no single winning mode for every mock-up. The shoe, the background colour and the logo all affect the result. An effect can look interesting while changing the artwork more than you want.
And be honest about the shape. Blending modes will not rescue a warp that still looks wrong. This example could use more refinement, so I would go back and improve the curve rather than call it finished just because a blend mode looks promising.
6. Rotate or flip the whole image, not just a layer
One final distinction is worth remembering. The commands under Edit > Transform affect the selected layer. If you want to rotate or flip the entire composition, go to Image > Image Rotation instead.
That menu contains rotation options and commands for flipping the whole canvas. Flipping it horizontally changes the shoes, the background and every logo together, rather than just mirroring one piece of artwork.
Use Edit > Transform for an individual element. Use Image > Image Rotation for the whole graphic.
For a practical logo mock-up, the main workflow is straightforward: place the artwork, duplicate it, fit the surface with Distort or Warp, and test how it blends. The tools get you there, but the small visual adjustments are what make the result feel believable.
Key terms
Smart Object
A layer type used when the Illustrator logo is placed into this document. Its thumbnail has a small identifying icon.
Rasterise
Convert the placed artwork into a regular pixel layer. In this exercise’s setup, this makes the unavailable transform options accessible.
Distort
A transform that lets you reposition the artwork’s corners to fit a flat plane in perspective.
Warp
A transform that bends the artwork using corners, curve handles and adjustments within the warp area.
Blending mode
A layer setting that changes how the artwork interacts visually with the image beneath it. Multiply, Linear Light and Hard Light are the options tested here.
FAQs
Should I use Distort or Warp for a Photoshop logo mock-up?
Use Distort when the logo needs to fit a flat surface at an angle, such as a billboard or magazine cover. Use Warp when it needs to bend around a curved surface, such as the side of a shoe.
Why does my warped logo still look pasted on?
Its shape may need more adjustment, or its colour may not be interacting convincingly with the photograph. Refine the warp, then test blending modes such as Multiply and Hard Light.
How do I cancel a transform in Photoshop?
Press Escape while the transform is active to cancel it. Press Enter or Return when you want to apply the adjustment.
How do I flip the entire Photoshop image instead of one layer?
Use Image > Image Rotation for the whole canvas. The flip options under Edit > Transform apply to the selected layer instead.
Written by Daniel Walter Scott — Founder of Bring Your Own Laptop & Chief Instructor
