Artwork placement

Everything about how your artwork lands inside a design area is set by the asset object on a smart object entry, plus two optional siblings for colour and tone. The request that carries them is Render a PSD mockup.

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Point the asset at your artwork

Give asset a url that is public, directly reachable and immutable: one URL, one image, for good. To change a design, publish it at a new URL and render with that. A URL reused for different content can return the earlier image. Google Drive is where this bites most often. Replace file and Manage versions keep the same link, so the link keeps resolving to the original design. Upload the new design as a new file, which gets its own link. See why a render shows old artwork. When artwork is generated on the fly and has no stable address, send the bytes instead. base64 carries the image with no data: prefix and content_type says how to read it, defaulting to image/png. Bytes take priority over a URL.

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Fit, size and rotation

Four values on asset decide where the design sits once the render has it. fit keeps the whole design visible, crop covers the area and cuts the overflow, and fill stretches to the bounds. crop is the common choice for product mockups because it covers the area without distorting the design. The older contain and cover spellings are still accepted, and full detail is on Fit and blend modes. The upload response gives each area a size of its own, for example 3000 x 3413. Author artwork at those dimensions, render with the area’s uuid, and placement into the visible bounds is handled for you. Larger is fine, smaller costs quality. The position that same response reports is where the area sits on the canvas, or inside the parent smart object’s document for a nested area, for drawing a preview in a browser rather than for a render body. Set size and position on the asset only when the artwork belongs somewhere other than the area’s default placement, and set both together. A logo pinned to one corner and a pattern that starts at a known offset are the two cases that need them. rotate turns the artwork inside the area, and the perspective and warp the designer built stay where they are.

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Colour and tone

Two optional siblings of asset sit on the same entry. color takes a hex value and a blending_mode, which gives you product colourways from a single artwork file. It accepts all 27 Photoshop layer blend modes, with an underscore or a space as the separator. multiply keeps the material texture readable under the colour, which is what makes a dark garment look printed rather than painted. adjustment_layers tunes the artwork itself. Send any subset, and every value you leave out stays at its default.

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Learn more

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Next steps