Flag Waves: House Flags From The National Maritime Museum

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The flag needs to be adjusted so the left side matches the tape that’s already attached to the pole. Drag the adjustment handles until it fits the shape. It doesn’t need to be exact. Use Command T/Ctrl T to enter Free Transform mode, and adjust the size of the flag so it fits onto the existing tape attached to the flagpole. Don’t perform any more distortions yet. All we’re interested in here is the approximate size. Now it’s time to adjust the rest of the flag so it’s waving more effectively. You can drag the handles, or the corner points, or the four interior intersections in Image Warp to move it around. Try to make it look less stiff by waving the edges in a more realistic, organic way. When you’re satisfied, hit Enter.

Press the Image Warp button on the Options Bar, and choose—naturally enough—Flag as the distortion preset from the pop-up menu (the menu will default to reading Custom). The initial effect is a little extreme, but it’s a start.

According to 17 USC Section 105, the American flag is public domain. (Using a different flag? Most flags are free for anyone to use.) This means that you can use its image in your video projects and you don’t have to pay or credit anyone. The folds created so far can look a little lumpy. So use the Smudge tool to smear the ends into more precise, tighter folds. Use a small brush, with a strength of around 90% for best results.

Head over to the effects panel. (If it doesn’t show up in your window by default, go to Window > Effects.) Search for “wave warp”.The Burn tool darkens the image; the Dodge tool brightens it. You can hold Alt or Option to temporarily access the Dodge tool. Drag another loop just above the original Burn loop, to add the highlight to the flag. It’s now an easy matter to drag those handles on the left, to change the flag’s distortion so that it better matches the flagpole. Search online for a vector of the flag. I ended up creating my own in Adobe Illustrator and saving it as a .png, just so I could ensure it was high quality. (I also diluted the colors a bit to make it less jarring than the true red and blue.) Here’s our starting image: a flagpole and a flag, on separate layers. I’ve chosen the flag of Sweden to begin with, because it’s a simple design that will allow us to see the distortion and shading process clearly. We can change the design to whatever we want later. Here’s the result of the work so far. The flat artwork we started with now looks much more like a real rippling flag—so much so that you barely notice that the design of the flag itself isn’t really rippling.