There are numerous tutorials out there showing you how to make a virtual tattoo using Photo Shop. Many of these use overlay in the blending modes to achieve this. The only problem with most of the tutorials out there is that the virtual tattoo looks sort of, well overlaid and not actually following the contour of the body it is place on.

 I have however seen one tutorial where the virtual tattoo seem to follow the contours of the body but alas it was in black and white only. Not that black and white tattoos and pictures don’t look good but they don’t suit all purposes.

 In this tutorial I will show you a method using the displace filter to make a virtual tattoo look as though it follows the contours of the body. So let’s get started….

• The first thing you need to do is locate an image of a person that you want to place the tattoo on. I went to www.sxc.hu to find one. Make sure you choose one with lots of exposed skin so you have more areas to place the virtual tattoo.
• The next thing you need is the image of the virtual tattoo. Since I am a little lazy sometimes I just looked through my hard drive and found this image of a Fighting Hell Fish (if your a Simpson’s Fan you probably just got a good laugh.).

• Now open the picture of the person you want to place the virtual tattoo on in Photo Shop. Duplicate the layer, you can do this by dragging the layer to the New Layer Icon . Now click on the eye next to the original layer to turn off its visibility. I always try and do this so if I do a major screw up I still have the original image in tact.
• Make sure you are working on your duplicate layer by clicking on it. Now might be a good time to change its name to person or woman, or something descriptive. This is a good practice to get into so when you are working with numerous layers you know whats what. Now in the Layers Pallet select the channels tab.
• Now click on each channel until you find the one that gives you the most contrast. This means that the bright areas are their brightest and the dark areas are there darkest. In my case it was the Reds channel.
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• Right Click or Ctrl Click on the channel that gives you the best contrast, then select Duplicate Channel. When the Duplicate Channel dialog box appears make sure under Destination, Document is set to New. You can then name it. I went with Tattoo map for a name. This document will become the displacement map for the tattoo.

• On you new image which should have open automatically click the Layers tab to go back to the layers. Now press Crtl+L to bring up the levels dialog. Here we will tweak the contrast a little bit. To do this you’ll move the far left and far right arrows under the Input Levels graph. The far left will control the darkness and the far right will make it lighter. Don’t over do it, on some images you may not have to do it at all. Want you want to be able to see is the curves of the body getting gradually darker as they move away from you.



• As you can see I really didn’t change it too much. But you can see that the image gets darker as it rolls of the shoulder. This should make for a good displacement map. Now be sure to Save this image. I called mine tattomap.psd . You can close it if you wish as we will no longer be working on it.
• Go back to the image of the person you want to place the tattoo on. Now go back to Channels and select RGB to turn the colors back on. Then click back on layers and select your duplicated layer.
• If you haven’t already open the image of the tattoo you want to place. Now using the Move tool drag your tattoo image onto the the picture of the person you want to virtual tattoo (I had removed the background from my tattoo image – and if you haven’t you need to do this). Using the Move Tool place the tattoo where you want. You may have to resize and rotate it so it fits. For my image I am placing it on her shoulder.


• If you adjusted the size or rated the tattoo you now need to press Enter to accept the changes. Now tattoos seldom have clearly defined edges (most likely because the ink spreads a little on the skin). So go to Filters > Blur > Gaussian Blur and blur it any where from .5 to 2 pixels. Depending on the image you have chosen for your tattoo, in my case I blurred it about 1.5 pixels.
• Now we are going to use the Displace filter. Go to Filters > Distort > Displace. Make sure your settings are the same as mine below.





• Press Okay and when it asks you for the displacement map file choose the one you created from the channels. Mine was the tattoomap.psd file. Then in the layer blending mode change it to Multiply in the Layers Pallet. Then adjust the opacity to around 75%. This should result in a really realistic looking tattoo.

 The Displace filter is a really powerful feature and you can use it to many more things. I hope this tutorial has shown you a better way to use photo shop to make a virtual tattoo. Happy Virtual Tattooing.

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