Mockups
Product photography is the expensive part of print on demand, and it is the same photograph over and over. Calibrate a blank once — say where the print goes on that particular image — and every design you make afterwards composites onto it for nothing.
A library of photographs, grouped by what they are of
Your blank product photos, and where the print goes on each one. Calibrate a blank once and every design you make afterwards goes on it for nothing. The app's own description of the screen
A blank is one photograph of one product in one colour — a black tee and a white tee are two blanks, because they are two photographs. They are grouped by kind, and the kind is whatever you say it is when you add the file: t-shirt, poster, mug, tote. Nothing here is limited to garments.
- Add your own photographs, or generate a blank when you have not got one.
- Grouped by product kind, because a library gets built in runs of one thing.
- Calibrated once — nothing composites onto a blank until its corners have been saved.
- Reuse a print area — copy the corners from a blank you have already done onto one shot the same way.
Two different questions that look like one
This is the distinction the whole screen exists for, and getting it backwards is the usual reason a mockup comes out wrong.
The print area
Four corners saying where the printable region of this photograph is. Every design composited onto the blank starts from those corners. It belongs to the photo, and you set it once.
The placement
Where one particular design sits inside that area — small and high on one chest, say. That belongs to the product, not the photograph, and is set when you make the mockup for it.
A worn garment is not a rectangle
The corners can be held square to each other, so dragging one moves the two beside it. That is right for a poster on a wall, or a garment laid flat or photographed straight on. A garment on a person at an angle genuinely is not a rectangle in the photograph, and forcing it to be one is what makes a print look pasted on — so the constraint can be released and each corner dragged on its own.
What stops it looking like a sticker
A design laid flat over a photograph reads as a sticker. What sells the illusion is the photo's own folds and shadows falling across the print — and how hard they fall depends on what the thing is made of. Cloth at full strength, a poster almost none, a mug somewhere in between.
So shading follows the material by default and needs no thought. It can be overridden for a photograph that is unusually creased, or unusually flat, for what it is made of.
Where the mockups end up
A calibrated blank is not an end in itself — it is the thing that makes listing photography nearly free from that point on. Open a product, press Make a mockup, and the design goes onto every blank of that kind you have calibrated. Those images are what go on the Etsy listing, and the same designs are what the print-on-demand providers are given to print.