Showcase Your Artwork – Make Your Own Mockups | in Adobe Photoshop
Maja Faber · Surface Pattern Designer
A tight 57-minute walkthrough of Photoshop mockup tricks, but it assumes you already know your way around layer masks.
What the course actually covers
Maja Faber's class is a compact, project-based walkthrough of one specific skill: turning a stock photo into a mockup that convincingly displays a surface pattern. It opens with framing (what a mockup is, ready-made versus self-made, where to source free photos from sites like Unsplash and Pexels) before moving into a sequence of five mockups that each add one new technique. The structure is the course's strongest design choice: a pillow gets a simple flat placement, a bed cover introduces perspective warp and the displace filter, a baby's outfit introduces gradient-map recoloring and the warp-to-fabric technique, a surfboard introduces photo retouching and color-matching, and a dark pattern on a dark hoodie introduces the exclusion blend mode. Each lesson builds directly on the last, so by the end a learner has actually assembled a working set of reusable mockup files rather than watched five disconnected demos.
Strengths
The technique explanations are specific rather than vague. The course names exact settings, like a 0.4-pixel gaussian blur or a 52 percent canvas texturizer scaling, which matters for anyone trying to replicate the result rather than just watch it happen. The Illustrator-to-Photoshop export tip, saving JPEGs as "art optimized" to eliminate the thin white lines that appear around pattern edges, is a genuinely useful and non-obvious fix that pattern designers run into constantly. The emphasis on making every mockup a smart object is also smart pedagogically: it means the final files are meant to be reused with new artwork indefinitely, which ties directly back to the promised business use case of showing clients how a design would look on real products.
Where it falls short
The course states plainly that a basic understanding of Photoshop is required, and that requirement is not a formality. Tools like the magnetic lasso, layer masks, smart objects, and blending modes are used constantly but never explained from first principles, so anyone without prior Photoshop exposure will lose the thread quickly. The pacing also gets dense toward the middle: the baby outfit lesson stacks a gradient map, a texturizer filter, and a warp adjustment in quick succession, and a first-time viewer will likely need to pause and repeat sections to keep up. The ready-made mockup lesson near the end is useful as a resource list but is thin compared to the hands-on lessons, functioning more as a bonus than a taught skill.
Bottom line
At under an hour, this is not a broad Photoshop course, and it does not try to be. It is a focused, well-sequenced technique reference for one commercially useful skill, best suited to someone who already has the software basics and wants a faster, cheaper alternative to buying premium mockup files.
The standout
The displace filter and warp tool combination in the perspective and texture lesson, which turns a flat pasted pattern into artwork that visibly follows fabric folds.
What you will learn
- How to prepare a pattern file in Illustrator and export it as an art-optimized JPEG to avoid white seam lines
- How to place artwork with layer masks, multiply blending, and gaussian blur for a basic realistic mockup
- How to warp artwork into perspective and use the displace filter so a pattern follows fabric folds and texture
- How to change the color of a non-white object using a gradient map so patterns work on colored fabric
- How to edit a source photo with the spot healing brush and match artwork colors to a photo's tone
- How to handle dark-background artwork using the exclusion blend mode instead of multiply
Best for: Pattern and surface designers who already know basic Photoshop navigation and want a repeatable, reusable system for making their own product mockups from stock photos.
Skip it if: Total Photoshop beginners, since the course moves quickly through layer masks, smart objects, and selection tools without explaining the basics of any of them.