From the course: Advanced Affinity Photo for Desktop

Introducing displacement maps - Affinity Photo Tutorial

From the course: Advanced Affinity Photo for Desktop

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Introducing displacement maps

- [Instructor] Here's a photograph of a piece of silk and I'm going to overlay a flag on top of this. And we want to make it look as if it's rippling over that silk. At the moment we can't see through it, so let's change the layer mode. We click on the word Normal, and as we drag down we can see all those different modes showing up for us. Multiply allows us to see the silk underneath, but the overall effect is too dark. Let's keep going down, until we hit Overlay, and this gives us a good balance between light and shade. We can still see the silk, but we can see the flag clearly as well. The trouble is that the flag has no sense of actually rippling over the silk, it's simply superimposed on top of it. Let's fix that using the Displace filter. We'll go to Filters, Distort and we'll choose Displace. And it brings up this dialog, there are two options, we can either load a displacement map from a separate file, or we can load the map from the layers underneath. When we do this, it'll choose the visible layers underneath this one, in this case it's just this silk layer. So let's select that. Now our flag is distorted by that silk, and as we drag the strength slider, it distorts more and more. The problem however is that all the fine detail in that silk, all the silk texture, is causing detailed ripples in our flag. And that's what we don't want, we only want the light and shade to affect our flag. So let's cancel this, we'll hide the flag layer and next we'll go ahead and see how we can treat this silk to make it more appropriate for use as a displacement map.

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