I was playing around with creating a new flag for a new country, and trying to recreate the look of the current Democracy 3 ones. With a little messing around and following a similar method to the one Cliffski shared in creating the Democracy 2 flags, I managed to come up with something I think works rather well, and I thought I would share in case anyone else wants to make use of it. Note that I did this with Photoshop, and so that’s what the instructions apply to. EDIT: I’ve now added GIMP instructions too, a few posts down.
First of all, download flag_blank.jpg (see attached), which looks like this:
Open this up in Photoshop. The first step is to save a copy of this as a .psd file (this is needed for a later step). For simplicity, I recommend flag_blank.psd.
Now get a copy of whatever flag you want to use (I’m using this Greek flag from Wikipedia as an example):
Copy this and paste it as a new layer on top of flag_blank.jpg. Now stretch this layer so that it covers the area of the flag. This actually works best if it overlaps the top and bottom borders by a few pixels.
Now, with this new flag layer selected, go to FIlter > Distort > Displace, and in the dialog box that pops up make sure says ‘Horizontal Scale: 10’ and ‘Vertical Scale: 10’ and click okay. Now you’ll be asked to pick a file, so pick the flag_blank.psd you created earlier.
You’ll now have a distorted looking flag, but it doesn’t have the highlights/shadows you want. To get those, look over to your list of layers and (making sure you still have the flag layer selected) look for a drop-down menu that currently says ‘Normal’. Click on this, and select ‘Overlay’. If you’ve done it right, the result should look something like this:
Now just save it as ‘flag_.jpg’ and there you have a country flag that fits in with the rest of the Democracy 3 ones.
Right, with a little messing around I’ve managed to recreate this effect in GIMP as well.
Creating this effect in GIMP:
First of all, download and open up flag_blank.jpg (see attachement on the first post). Make sure you’ve got a downloaded copy of the flag you want to apply the effect to too, such as the Greek flag above.
Now, click File > Open As Layers… and open up your flag as a new layer. Stretch it so that it covers the rippled flag area in the original flag_blank completely, with a couple of pixels overlap at the top and bottom.
Once you’ve done that, this is important: on your list of layers, right click on your flag layer (so on the layer containing the Greek flag for me) and click ‘Layer To Image Size’.
To get the rippled, distorted look on your flag, you can use Filters > Map > Displace, which is effectively identical to the Photoshop filter. For the X and Y displacement, set the displacement to 10.00 and click on the drop down menu on the right and select the background, flag_blank layer. On Edge Behaviour, select Smear and leave Displacement Mode as Cartesian. Once this is set up, click OK.
You’ll now have rippled looking flag, so the last step is to go back to the layer window, making sure you still have your flag’s layer selected, click on the drop down menu at the top that says ‘Mode: Normal’ and select ‘Overlay’. Now you should have a flag that looks like my final product in the openning post that you can save as flag_.jpg
