newbie needs help

obsean3 · 01-03-2006

Hey Folks

I've been lurking on the forums for quite a while and I love all the info here, but I need some help.

I have a poster that I had digitized, and what I want to do with it is to overlay it over a brick wall, so that it looks like the poster was painted on the brick. I'm then hoping to have it printed in a very large size to put on the wall in my boys new bedroom(such as wall paper).

I've created the brick wall. I tried just moving the image of the poster on top of it and then reducing the opacity of the poster, but that didn't work to well.

Long story short can someone help me with this.

P.S. I'd like to keep the texture of the brick.

Thanks....

verhere:

malboroman · 01-03-2006

The perfect tool for the job would be the filter 'displace' (filter > distort > displace)

What this does is that it takes the whites and blacks of an image and simulates 3d depth.

Man1c M0g wrote a nifty little tutorial about it, you can find it over here

Just play around with it and see if this is what you meant.

zapphnath · 01-03-2006

Another thing to keep in mind is, to be able to print it out at such a large size - and have it still look good - you're going to have to keep it as a very large file.
(A standard 8X10 photo, scanned in at 200dpi, is about six times the size of your screen (at 1024X768)). Don't re-size it smaller to make it easier to see because the end result will be extremely pixellated.
I know a lot of people are reading this and saying, "Well, duh!", but there are others who don't realise that, in the long run, it's an important factor to keep in mind.
And, yes, Displace will do what you want. Other things that might help would be to erase certain parts of the image and/or add some "grunge" to it, to get that "weathered" look.
There are many tutorials available on this subject, including some nice videos, (although I can't remember, right now, where I saw them). Simply search for "Displace"

smile_forgiven · 01-03-2006

If you want to try other things aswell.. you can simply place your poster on top of a brick background and play with the layer styles:
Overlay will make the brights shine through.. the others will probably do it as well but it will alter your image a little bit..

It's not as good as the displacing but it gives you effects, so I thought I'd let ya know !

obsean3 · 01-04-2006

Hey Everyone

Thanks for all the help. After sleeping on it last night, I actually figured it out. But I'm going to try the displace way of going at it and see if I like that look better.