Technical Slop

Heart-Shaped D-Map

Okay, this is going to be fun. You knew it was going to be, didn't you?

Now, there are several ways of going about making a D-Map. Okay, a *ton* of ways, but for these discussions, there are 3 major ways that I use. I'll show one near the end of this page, then show the other two on the next. No matter which method used, they all have require a mask and a height map. The mask is basically an Alpha channel with an outline of the shape. You know, lots of white and lots of black. The height map is basically an Alpha you would use with Lighting Effects. You know, lot's of gray.

Okay, so I've decided on a using a heart. This was made with Custom Shape and the prefab heart shape. Started in the middle, held alt + shift, and dragged it out.

This graphic is 200x200, but my working document is actually 500x500.

So, there is my mask. Time to use it to make the height map.

Copied the mask into another Alpha channel. Loaded it as a selection onto itself. Then I got busy with Gaussian Blur. First 40, then 20, then 10, then 5, then deselect and gave it a final Gauss of 2.

Why, that's almost magical. Let's do some exploring.

For exploring a height map, one of my favorite tricks is to use Select > Colour Range. Set the Fuzziness to around 40 and then run the Eyedropper/Colour Picker do-hickey all over the place. By running all over the height map and keeping an eye on the selection preview, the contours of the height or z-depth can be seen. Spiffy. Then just cancel out of Select > Colour Range.

Another method I use for exploring a height map is to use an Adjustment Layer > Gradient Map. This means some cut-n-paste into a new Layer (no big deal).

So here we have my height map with an Ad-Layer Grad-Map. The Grad-Map is just a bunch of alternating black and white evenly spaced out.

Looks like I've got too much white in the middle and I'm not exactly happy with where the humps meet. Back to the height map, and spread out the shades with a tug in Curves. However, I'm not up to fixing the space between the humps. With just the little Curves tweak, I'm happy.

Yeah, happy with the height map and the selection. Time to put the D-Map together. Going to be using the Exclusion Layer Mask method (have you read Tweakables?).

It's set up just like Exclusion Layer Mask as shown in Tweakables (you have read it, haven't you?).

At the bottom is Zoom Cube, but it's inverted. Inverting it helps me keep things straight in my head.

Next is the height map and the Blending Mode is set to Exclusion.

Next up is a Curves Ad-Layer. This is Curves to tweak for slightly different looks or for adjust z-depth (as it were).

On top of that, also clipped, is another Curves Ad-Layer. This is what makes the Exclusion layer act as a mask instead of an invert. (You did read Tweakables, right?)

At the very top of the Layers palette is my Custom Shape with the heart in it. Notice that this Layer's visibility is turned off.

Eventually, the D-Map looks something like this.

Save it as a PSD to be used as a D-Map, grab a target photo, and get busy with Displace.

Here I used the D-Map on a photo of a brick building. Then I added a whole bunch of stuff for finishing touches. Mainly Lighting Effects and Curves. Couldn't really tell you what all I used.

But I can tell you I used the selection mask to clean out the outside of the heart. Just cut-n-paste and some Free Transform (ctrl + t) to make it fit.

Tada.

In a lot of cases, using an Exclusion D-Map, either Invert or Layer Mask, works just fine. Yeah, it's a pretty solid technique. Matter of fact, if you can make a height map and slap it together like the above, you can duplicate exactly how ShapeShifter handles distortion. Very not bad for a few stock filters.

That was fun, but there are two other techniques that I've been known to use with a height map and a selection mask. Let's move on to the next page and go over them real quick like.