Displacement Effect in PaintShop Pro

Displacement Effect in PaintShop Pro

View the youtube video here: Displacement Effect

This tutorial will cover how to bend an image around a texture, in this case a face to give a compelling look as if the image follows the surface.

Color Schemes

The first step is coloring the image that will be displaced onto the stock image of the girl.  One capability I wanted to point out was PaintShop Pros tool that helps you select a color scheme.  Clicking one of the colors in the Material Palette, you can choose a color set.  To give myself enough diversity I chose a Tetrad.

Having selected a set of 4 colors, I could Add that set to a Palette, and make it easy to access when coloring the coloring page.  I just used the Fill tool for the different regions of the coloring page, and tried to maintain distinct regions of the image that were either predominantly red/orange or predominantly green/blue.

Displacement Effect

The main portion of the tutorial is getting the settings for the displacement just right for this image.  One note on image selection, I would recommend an image with a decent amount of contrast, and that has a pronounced single light source.  In this case the model has a key light just above and in front of her, and I believe this will help make the displacement effect work.

In preparation for using the displacement effect, have a copy of this image available in the workspace.  This will be needed for the displacement effect dialog.

So now with your original face photo, copy the coloring page as a new layer and arrange and scale the image so that it aligns to the image how you desire it.  I wanted the flower object to overlap with the subject's right eye.  Decrease the opacity of the image to facilitate alignment.

Now let's apply the displacement effect.  Here is the settings I used.  Note that the copy of the face image is now used when you select the Displacement map.  Don't use the image you are working on or it will not work correctly.

As for the other settings, Intensity controls the strength of the deformation, and the radial dial I would describe in this way.  Treat the dial as an arrow.  In the dialog box below the arrow would be pointing down.  The direction of the dial (as an arrow) should represent the direction of the primary lighting in the image.  So in this case, since the key light is up shining down, I have the "arrow" pointing down.  You may need to experiment with it more to see what produces the most convincing effect.

Applying these settings will give you a displaced image.

The effect may not be obvious until you change the blend layer to Burn.

Since the Burn blend layer incorporates the color of the underlying layer, it has given the coloring page colors a slightly warmer tone (which I didn't like).  So let's duplicate the face image layer and drop the saturation to zero.

Now that we have the color fixed we need to mask out both the grayscale layer and the coloring page so that this only affects the face.

In hindsight I would recommend using a mask for both layers, but in the video I just carefully erased both layers to keep them in sync.

Blending Contrast

Now for blending the edges of the face with the hair, it is easier when you can see what the final hair effect will look like.  Since the Burn blend layer on the face increases the contrast as a side-effect, we need to increase the contrast of the hair to match.

For the first pass of contrast I used Adjust > Brightness Contrast > Levels with the following settings:

• Black: 35
• Middle Gray: 122
• White: 198

Which produced this image:

It didn't seem like enough contrast, so I chased that with a some Soft Light Blend Layer contrast.  This is achieved by duplicating the face image and changing the blend layer to Soft Light.  I dialed in the opacity to 73.  To produce this image.

The face still looked a little flat, so to bring out more detail I increased the contrast of the grayscale layer.  Using the Levels tool again, I set the settings this way

• Black: 18
• Middle Gray: 126
• White: 200

This has the effect of adding more depth to the face.

So now with the hair contrast better matching the face, we can finish cleaning up the edges (with the eraser tool).

Correcting Eyes

For the final step we are going to place emphasis on the eyes.  Having the coloring page over the eyes has the effect of muting them (we don't want this).  We are drawn to eyes when we see a face, so they should really stand out.

To correct this, simply erase the region of the eyes on the coloring page layer, and add some color back on the iris.  You can also increase the contrast of the eyes to really make them pop.

After adding some punch to the eyes, the last little bit to add emphasis is to add some vingette to the image.  There are many ways to do this in PaintShop Pro, but the way that I prefer the most is to create a new layer, and use the Fill tool with a radial gradiant color that blends from black to transparent.  Settings can be seen below.

After you fill the new raster layer with the vignette gradient, change the blend layer to Soft Light, and adjust the opacity to taste.  And that's it, at this stage you should have something very similar to the image below.