I've noticed a lot of people asking about t-shirt templates and how to create a more realistic-looking placement for their presentations. I thought I'd post an easy (hopefully) tutorial for creating t-shirt templates in Photoshop. There may be better ways of doing this - this is just what I've learned on my own through trial and error and by reading other tutorials.

The first step is to find a picture you like of someone wearing a white or light-coloured shirt. If it's already a blank tee you can skip to the next step. If the shirt has a design on it (and it's a smaller design) you can remove the design pretty easily using the clone tool, or by copying and pasting sections of the blank shirt over the design.



The next step is to isolate the shirt on it's own layer. You can do this a number of ways - quick mask, or with the magic wand tool. For this tutorial I just carefully traced around the shirt with the lasso tool and pasted the shirt on a new layer.

Once you have the shirt on its own layer, duplicate the layer so you have two shirts plus the background image. Lock the pixels on the second shirt and paint it a solid colour. In this example I used an existing Threadless colour. You can subsequently change the shirt colour for future designs by using the paint bucket or just apply a colour overlay.

Set the top layer to "multiply" so that the whites become transparent but the shadows will still show through. You can adjust the layer properties so that you get the best results possible. In this case I lowered the saturation so it was closer to a white t-shirt and played around with the curves to strengthen the shadows a bit.

Your design goes between these two layers so that the final result should look something like this:



Final placement image with layers flattened:



NOTE: To set a layer to multiply go to the layer menu that says "layers/channels/paths". There's a little drop down right beside where you set the layer opacity. It is set to "normal" by default but you can click on it and open the drop down which gives you all the layer options, including multiply.