Creating Custom Shirts With ShirtMockup

Mockups are great. They’re really good at allowing you to show others what your design is going to be like before it’s even finished. That’s no different with t-shirt designs. Sometimes, you spend so long working on the design itself that you don’t put much thought about how you’re going to present it to others.

Obviously, you could always mock it up in Photoshop but time is of the essence and it still might not look that realistic when you’ve finished. People want to know what it really looks like, not just an interpretation. With ShortMockup, you can do this really quickly and create photo-realistic mockups for your t-shirt designs in a matter of seconds. Read on to find out more.

Overview

ShirtMockup is a really cool app that allows you to quickly and effortlessly create photo-realistic mockups of t-shirt designs so that you needn’t worry about time constraints. Within seconds, it’s possible to use their Flash app to turn your t-shirt designs into great-looking mockups that you could easily place onto websites or in print to show your future customers what your designs look like printed onto t-shirts, even if the production process hasn’t yet started. The app provides some a small set of tools to get the job done efficiently and it can aid to severely decrease time spent in Photoshop trying to get the best looking image.

Pricing

This is one of the many apps that employs the highly successful freemium pricing plan for its usage. You can create low quality mockups with a small array of tools at your disposal for free and there is the possibility of an optional upgrade to receive loads of great features. The professional plan provides all of the neat tools that come with the free version, but upgraded heavily. There’s the option of loads of different t-shirt types and the mockups created with the pro version are of a significantly higher quality and lack the watermarks present in the free version.

It’s quite cheap ($9.99/month) and anyone that subscribes to the mailing list can bag themselves a month’s free trial of the paid plan. Overall, it is moderately priced and the time saved from spending ages making mockups can be put towards the more important of tasks.

Create Your “T”

1: Choose Tee Type

The first thing you’ll need to do is choose the style of shirt you’d like to use. Whilst the standard one is simply flat, and is thus quite wrinkled, the “Distressed tee” appears to mimic what the shirt would look like when being worn. The latter is quite grainy in appearance but when styled with your image, can give a really grungy but attractive look.

They also plan to introduce more styles in the future which will be great if you plan to offer different styles yourself.

2: Add an Image

No t-shirt is complete without a great design. Except, of course, the ones that are simply plain – but we’re not making one of those. ShirtMockup makes it an easy process to add images to your mockup and once you’ve chosen an image, it automatically appears on your mockup. The images must be in either JPEG or GIF format and there is a size limit of 300kb per image. This limit is, of course, removed for those who opt for the upgraded account which comes packed with a load more features. Either way, small images look fine on the mockup because the mockup itself is rendered quite small.

3: Alter and Color Your Mockup

Once your image is added, it’s time to transform it so that it looks right on the mockup. You’re given a couple of really simple options which I will go through. There is the option to change the color of the shirt. By default, this is black but you can use the tool to choose a colour that is features a lot within your design so that the shirt blends well with the design. You can rotate the image based on the look you’d like to go for. You can also scale the image up and down depending on your requirements so that it looks good and to ensure that the image is not too small or large.

There is also the ability to move your image as well by dragging it inside the mockup. This allows you to make sure that your image is well-placed and so that bits are not missing.

4: Save the Image

To save the image to your computer, simply press the huge purple “Save Image” button. You’ll be then asked if you’d like to join the mailing list. By doing this, you can bag yourself a month’s free trial of the pro version and with it, a range of new features to create some really cool tee mockups. If you’d just like to download the file, choose “No Thanks”. You’ll be then prompted to choose a location for the JPEG-ed image file and then you’re done.

Optional: Use Layered PSDs

If you’d like complete control over the design of your mockups, ShirtMockup also provides the option of purchasing a variety of PSD templates which can be modified in Photoshop to create really cool designs. These feature some designs from some of the top tee brands and there’s even tutorials showing you how to use the templates to achieve some nice looks.

Final Thoughts

My thoughts on ShirtMockup are generally quite positive. Whilst the app is really simply to use and offers some basic features, the results are outstanding and you’re left with some really nice photo-realistic mockups. Though the quality of the output files are quite low, they are still perfectly usable and it’s not a massive investment for the pro version either. You’re given a really simple set of tools to get a job done within a fraction of the time that would usually be spent fiddling around in Photoshop.

Overall, I believe that the app really does do its job well. You’re able to create some really nice-looking photo-realistic t-shirt mockups in a tiny proportion of the time that would be spent should you make them manually.