Transforming Your PoD Mockups: Use Stock Photos for Eye-Catching Composites

The one thing you ABSOLUTELY want to avoid when promoting your work on social media is being boring. Yet, that's the mistake maby a newbie artist/designer selling on PoD is doing. Heck I am guilty of having done that a few times back in 2017 when I didn't know any better. Fortunately, the Instagram algorithm was a LOT more forgiving back then than it is now, so for all the eyeballs I was not catching in hashtag feeds, at least my followers were seeing, as boring and bland as it was. You know what I'm talking about, the joining a PoD like Redbubble and thinking their product mockup images are so cool you can keep on sharing them everywhere and that promoting your content isn't going to require more effort than downloading them and putting all over Instagram, Facebook or Threads. And yeah, they are kind of cool, well at least a few of them are, like this one :

The problem is that every single artist/designer on Redbubble has access to the same range of products to display their art on, and the exact same mockups to use as promotional images. This means that the only thing original in those mockup is your art, and in a hashtag feed populated by Redbubble products, yours has no chance of ever standing out. If you constantly use them and nothing else in your own grid, it will turn your Instagram feed into a very salesy product catalogue rather than position you as a professional designer. It doesn't mean you should stay away from those mockups and never share them, but you need to up your game a little and show a bit more range with your content strategy. I already wrote about using the Gen AI tool in Photoshop and more recently about using professional PSD mockups in your portfolio. Today I want to let you on another little trick that is free and easy to pull using using eye catching stock photos to create a composite image with your PoD mockup image like I did above with the Society6 pouch. In it's original avatar, that pouch looks like this on the Society6 website:

I think we can all agree that it's pretty generic and boring. It does a great job at showing you what the product looks like which is something people who are already shopping on S6 will want to see. But it doesn't make for a great image to use on Instagram. Why? because you are not in the business of being a sales catalogue on IG. Your mission on social media is to sell an idea, a dream, a feeling. You need to start treating your social media pages as a shop window rather than a display shelf inside the shop. This means your content needs to be eye-catching, and composites are a GREAT way to do that.

It sounds complicated, but it really isn't if you have a tiny bit of Photoshop knowledge, which at this point I assume you have being a surface designer. All you need to get you started is one of your PoD mockups and a stock photo from a free website like Unsplash or Pexels which offer free to use images under the creative commons license. For my pouch composite, I used this lovely one from Pexels :

This stock image is from Tara Winstead, it's free to download on Pexels and there is no attribution required when you use it. When I look for stock photos to use for my composite, I usually run a search for a flatlay image, in this case, I simply entered "white flatlay" in the search bar as I knew I wanted a neutral background that didn't compete for attention with my bold teal and brown Art Deco carry-all pouch, but also still gave a sense of luxury and refinement. My selection criteria for a flatlay is always to pick one that has a significant amount of blank space so that I can place my product in it without too much of a constraint. Once I have both the product and the stock photo, I open them both in Photoshop.

The first step is always to remove the background from the product image. If the art on the product is dark enough and has no white/grey/beige in it that task is pretty quick as Photoshop has a "remove background tool". It becomes a bit trickier if the design on the product is light and I might need a combination of magic eraser and regular eraser to get it just right, or play around with the mask the background removal tool used.

The second step is to resize the stock photo around the size of the product image. Society6 mockups are usually around 700 x 700 pixels at 72dpi so I tend to resize stock photos to around 1000 pixels wide knowing I will use the negative space along with what is in the image. Once that is done, I simply drag the product mockup into the stock photo and position it the way I want :

Here I tilted it a bit, and made it overlap the dry flowers and the terrycloth towel so that it looks like it belongs there.

Last but not least, I double click on the product mockup layer to select the drop shadow option and add a bit of a drop shadow that matches the natural shadows in the stock photo's scene, just so it doesn't look like it's been just pasted on top of another image but really belong IN the image.

Even though Instagram now favours a 4:5 ratio I still do a lot of my content as squares because it looks better on my blog, on Threads and FB and quite frankly the whole super curated and aesthetic Instagram grid fad died years ago so I don't care how my grid really look there, once a person open my pictures os see them in the main feed, they still see them square. Notice how I cropped the image above in such a way that the pouch is also slightly cropped, this accentuate the idea that this pouch belongs in that stock photo since all the elements in the photos aren't centered themselves, it would look off to have the pouch as the only element that hasn't a bit of it off frame.

Of all the ways to create eye-catching content with my product mockups, the stock photo composite is my favourite and I use it regularly, especially with my printable calendar blog images or my Patreon printable illustration.