Have you ever wanted to take an image and make it look like it was spray painted on a wall or make it look like it was naturally on top of another part of an image? It is actually pretty simple to combine several different images and make them look like they are all part of the same thing.
You could always do it the beginners way and just stack the images on top of each other in Photoshop, but that doesn't look natural, not matter how much you try and adjust the opacity or the blend modes. In this tutorial post, I will show you how to create a displacement map that will make the image follow the contours of your base image, so that it will sit naturally on top of it and then I will show you the easiest way to blend the two images together.
Disclaimer:
I am using a Mac for this, so I will be referring to the the shortcuts using the Mac keys, so I am not sure what the Windows keys are because every time I try and use a Windows PC, I get aids.
I started with this stock image of a brick wall. Then I opened it up in Adobe Photoshop, because that is what I use for all of my photo manipulation stuff. 
First you need to desaturate your image. You can do this by pushing Command + U or Ctrl + U then move the slider in the saturation window.
Next you want to adjust the levels by opening the levels window. Bring it up by pushing Command + L or Ctrl +L. Move the sliders on the left and right in a bit to make the image more contrasty and punchy.
After that, you are ready save this part of the work, so go to Save As...
You are going to want to save this as a PSD file, so make sure that you change the file formate to Photoshop. You should name it something like "displacement" so it is easy to remember because you are going to need it later.
Now close the displacement file and open the original brick image again and then you can start bringing in other image files and start stacking them into your layers.
Push "T" to bring up the text box and then you can write out some text if you want, or you can just keep putting pictures if you don't want any text.
With your text layer selected, if you go to the "FX" button at the bottom menu, it will bring up a bunch of different things you can play around with the make your text stand out a bit more. These different effects are pretty cool for the graffiti style text to make them appear more realistic.
I used a gradient overlay and an outerglow to make mine pop a bit more. I did have an inner glow, but ended up turning it off because it looked dumb after a while.
So now I am going to be adjusting the size of my text and the Hive logo to match the angles of the wall, so I will need to convert the text layer to a Smart Object. A smart object retains resolution when it is scaled up and down, unlike if you rasterize an object and then resize it, so if you ever convert images, use the smart object option and it will make your objects a lot clearer as you work with them and adjust the sizes.
To get the images to follow the lines on the wall, I pushed Command T to bring up the scale box around the different objects, and then while holding the Command key, I dragged each corner to where I wanted them. Holding the Command key you are able to change the perspective of things. It is pretty handy, but can really make things end up looking pretty weird if you aren't careful.
Now that you have all of your images in place that you want to be a part of the "graffiti effect", select them all in the layers panel on the right and then go to the Layers menu and select Merge Layers. This will make all of the different selected image layers the same layer.
Be sure that you have the graffiti image layer selected and go to the Filter menu, select Distort, then Displace.
The next pop up window will ask how much of the effect you want. This part is up to you, but too much will end up looking dumb, so don't go too high, but too little won't even be noticeable. Anything above 5 or so is good.
Be sure you have Stretch to Fit and Repeat Edge Pixels selected on the other options.
After you push OK, then some of the magic happens. The displacement effect has done its part, but the images don't look too great yet. Now we have to blend it all together.
Some people just mess with the opacity and call it good, but there is a far better way to do it that will make it look real.
Go to the Layer menu, select Layer Style, then Blending Options.
Now the magic happens. In the Blending Options window, at the very bottom, there are two sliders. You can move them back and forth and watch how the image interacts with the background.
Now the best part is that if you hold the Option key, you can split the slider into two different parts and have even more control on each side, letting you fine tune the blending to make it look even more natural.
As you can see, it does a pretty good job at blending and making it all appear natural. The displacement map makes the image follow the contours of the background image. This sure beats just dropping one image on top of the other and adjusting opacity.
Thanks for taking the time to check out my tutorial. I might do some more of these and teach a bit more about Photoshop. It is a very powerful tool, but it has a very steep learning curve, but once you get the hang of it, it is a blast to use.
I hope to see some work that you all do using some of these techniques. Thanks for stopping by, you are awesome.
