Folded Paper

Make a new document, 1000×1000 pixels, white background.

Now open the map you did in the previous tutorial and import it in this document.

With magic wand remove all the white in the map layer. Now, if you turn off the background layer, your image should look like this:

From the ruler, drag some guides where you want the map to be folded, like this example:

With the rectangle marquee tool, drag around the first portion of the map, then right click on it and choose “Layer via Copy”. You’ll notice a new layer appeared in the layers palette.

Do the same with the other portions of the map. Now turn off the map layer. If you did everything right, your layers palette should look like mine:

Hit CTRL+H (Command+H on Macintosh) to hide the guides. Now keeping the CTRL key pressed, click on the thumbnail of the first slice of the map. Your selection should appear. Hit CTRL+T (Cmd +T on Mac) to enter the free transform mode. Now right click on the selection and choose “Skew” and skew it like in my example:

Do the same with the second cut of the map, but skew the opposite side of the selection. Take care to combine the edges perfectly. My example:

Do the same with the remaining parts of ther map. Now, with the CTRL key pressed, go to the layer palette and choose all parts of the map and merge their layers. Yous should have something like this:

Not bad, huh? Let’s proceed with further enhancements. CTRL+Click on the folded map layer (resulted from the merging of the layers) to bring the selection. Now press CTRL+T (Command+T on Mac) to enter again in the free transform mode. Right click and choose Distort.

Now play around to get the right perspective. Here is mine:

Make a new layer under de map layer and paint the shadow of the map with a black brush.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 17th, 2005 at 11:27 am and is filed under Photoshop Tutorials. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.