I’m looking for a tutorial on how to build a photoshop book cover mockup from scratch. I have some ideas and am giving it my best shot, but I’m missing something crucial; could you point me to some good tutorials on youtube or web, I have searched and could not find any, all I’m getting are results on how to a place a cover design on ready mockup : ///
Where I am stuck is creating a smart object on the curved spine - I try to use a wrap to follow the curve but it only curves the edges but not an actual plane.
Yeah, Photoshop’s transformation tools aren’t up to the task. I’m not saying it’s impossible, but better tools exist in other applications.
Photoshop has a few basic 3D tools for things like this, which worked reasonably well. However, Adobe began removing these tools in the most recent versions of the app. They’re saying the technology they used for this in Photoshop doesn’t match up with newer hardware.
Why they don’t update their outdated software, I don’t know. I suspect it has to do with Adobe preferring to keep their 3D applications as separate entities. Adobe seems to have finally gotten serious about investing in 3D technology, but most of their 3D apps don’t come with Creative Cloud. Anyway, they’re overkill for what you asked about.
The 3D app that does come with Creative Cloud (if you have it) is Adobe Dimension. In some ways, it’s a beefed-up version of Photoshop’s previous 3D tools. If you have Dimension, the results will be much better than with Adobe’s transformation tools.
I can’t go into detail on how to use Dimension here, but it’s not an especially difficult application to learn. Using it is a matter of selecting one of Dimension’s basic shapes, then altering it to, in your case, match the shape of the book spine. From there, you’d paste in the flat version from Photoshop and map it to the surface of the shape you’ve created.
It wouldn’t be difficult to build the entire book object in Dimension, then map flat Photoshop renditions of the covers and the spine onto the book object shape. From there, you could move the entire thing into Photoshop for fine-tuning.
I’m grateful for the response! I’ll give the Adobe Dimension a go, but I think I’ll still need to use Photoshop to produce reusable PSD mockups. A new project requires me to produce a variety of PSD book mockup templates, and I’ve hoped there’s a simpler approach to alter smart objects when working with curved surfaces. These aren’t particularly large curves, but they still need to be done correctly or the effect wont be good.
Have you tried mapping art in Illustrator? Or do you need Photoshop for photo-realistic post?
This video puts a label on a 3D bottle, but can be adapted for other surfaces Illustrator 3D Revolve with Image Mapping - YouTube