This tutorial will show you how you can use displacement maps for placing many kinds of design onto many different surfaces. I'm going to map a 2d flag image using a photograph of some crumpled silk to create a realistic 3D flag;
Step 1: Open your fabric and your flag image in photoshop. Apply gaussian blur to your fabric photograph (Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur) and experiment with the radius to hide the detail of the fabric and keeping only the folds.
Step 2: Save your fabric to a PSD file (File > Save as). I saved mine as silk.psd
Step 3: Starts working on your flag photo. Apply the displacement map filter to your flag with your blurred fabric photo, so mine is the silk.psd file. (Filter > Distort > Displace)
and I get this..
Step 4: Go back to your fabric photograph and select all area in your fabric photo with your marquee tool or simply by using ctrl+a, copy (ctrl+c), paste it (ctrl+v) on your flag image and change the layer mode to "Hard Light".
That's it..and, here's my final image;
