A great feature available in Customer's Canvas is the ability to create realistic preview mockups for your products. 


Being able to provide your customers with an accurate preview for the product they are customizing could be the difference between them placing an order and abandoning their cart; however, this can be a challenge when a product has a complex shape such as mugs, phone cases, etc.

 

With Preview Mockups, you can take a product photo and put the customized design as an overlay, giving your customers a preview that looks 3D. 



Creating a simple Product Mockup in Photoshop


Creating a mockup file is quite simple, here are the steps. 
  1. Open a mug photo you would like to put a design on.
  2. Add a layer named "Design 1" that has the same size ratio as the design file for the project 
    (ie. if your design file located in Assets > Designs has page sizes that are 4" x 8", the "Design 1" layer should be the same size OR have an aspect ratio of 1:2).
  3. Convert the Design layer to a smart object by right clicking the layer > convert to smart object.If the layer does not have the icon shown above, it has not yet been converted to a Smart Object


  4. If your product is multiple pages, you can repeat these steps and name the layer for page 2 "Design 2", page 3 "Design 3", etc.



That is the simple explanation for how to create preview mockups to be used in Customer's Canvas however let's take a look at the examples below:


An overlay on a product photo.
Emulation of a warp effect in 2D software.


The steps we have taken will create a mockup similar to the image on the left but notice how much more realistic the one on the right is. To use advanced editing techniques to warp your design to the product, continue with the steps below. 





Using Advanced Editing

We will be using the below mug and wrap-around design layer as an example



Let's warp the layer to the object with the steps below:
  1. Switch the design layer into the warp mode (Edit > Transform > Warp).
  2. Select the Custom warp type.
  3. Manually adjust the surface control points.
  4. Confirm the warp when you are happy with how it looks


5. If you would like a portion of the design layer to be hidden on the mockup, you can do this by creating a layer mask. Draw a work path with the Pen tool or one of the shape tools, and then click Layer > Vector mask > Current path.


6. If you would like some aspects of the background to show through the design such as shadows or the glossy reflection of light in this example, you can set the Design layer's blend mode to Multiply. 



7. Save your file as a .PSD and upload it in your Customer's Canvas application under Assets > Images. 





Connecting your mockup to a template


To connect a mockup to a template, open you Customer's Canvas application, go to the Product Specifications tab, and select your template.

Under Attributes > Preview Mockup File, select the .PSD file you uploaded to the Assets > Images folder. 




When a user customizes the product and clicks Next, the preview page will now mockup the design as shown below.