There has been a good bit of conversation about the PhotoPop designs on several Zazzle products. Indeed, I joined some of it. The truth is that the PhotoPop design element, so far, belongs exclusively to Zazzle Studios - their own production company. It has not been offered as an option to independent designers. I have requested it as, I think, others have done. We’ll see. In the meantime, several designers (myself included) came up with a workaround to produce the same effect. But it means the customer has a bit more work to do and they often don’t want to do the extra work or they don’t get it right because it is a bit difficult for the designer to explain in the description. It isn’t hard to do so I came up with a short video (less than 5 minutes) that explains the process. This replaces an earlier one I made but this one is much shorter than the earlier version and more succinct. Feel free to use it if you have been doing workarounds to duplicate the PhotoPop feature. Just have your customers search for “PhotoPop revisited” on YouTube or copy and paste this link: https://youtu.be/fFEK4ZLHDXk. Let me know what you think.
I’ve looked at some of the “Photo Pop” cards offered by Z and honestly, I don’t get it.
They’re too complicated to work for an easy replace-with-your-own-photo approach.
Here’s the default preview for one of Z’s cards.
After I click Personalize and then “change image”
And then if i open the Layers panel to try to see what is going on:
What??? I’m a Designer and don’t even want to try to figure that out. I’ve looked at numerous “pop” designs in the MP and nine times out of ten, after you replace with your own image, the text is covered up in whole or in part by the image with no intuitive way to fix things. I think the visual effect is a neat parlor trick but as a template, nope, it’s not working. So I wouldn’t worry about Z themselves having cornered the market for this effect as it doesn’t work out.
You’re absolutely right. Your specific picture doesn’t seem to have a background . But most of time the idea is to make the character pop in their own initial photo background. And this is ok, only if you start with a picture that has exactly the right size to fill the product entirely, but with characters that are placed in order to avoid hiding the texts . If you try to resize the characters only or move them , it’s not possible because the character layer is locked grouped with the background layer and both of them will resize or move. So the people have to initially start with a picture that already respects the texts placement constraints. ( Not so easy ! )
If the designs are created by Zazzle Studios, the PhotoPop feature works every time. You don’t need to do anything except upload your own photo. There are two ways to know if it is a genuine PhotoPop design by Zazzle. One is in the listing – it will show this text:
The other way is to open the product and see who is listed as the designer. It should say: Zazzle Studios.
If either of those is not present, the designer has either called their design “PhotoPop” in the title or in the description. But it is not what Zazzle calls PhotoPop. If you watched my video “PhotoPop Revisited” you know that PhotoPop designs (at present) are exclusively a product of Zazzle Studios. Designers can create a workaround but it must be done in Zazzle’s Design Editor. It should be done exactly as I describe for a “fix” in the video. With this workaround, the text will always seem to disappear when the customer uploads their photo. But, the video shows how to get it back. I suspect that some designers have either not mastered this process or have created a similar design in Photoshop or Canva (or others) with the mistaken belief that the Design Editor will recognize the design and reproduce it as is. Not so. If you create a workaround design as described in my video, the “fix” to restore the text is easy. Just a few more steps to get it done. Thanks for all the responses. Hope this lengthy response helps.
I did this exact same design of “Daddy” and had no problems. All you have to do is upload your own photo. However, when used a dog photo instead of people, it may have messed up things. Don’t know. Probably because the dog photo was a closeup of the dog. There was no room for the text to appear above the dog’s head. I uploaded the photo of a family and this design fine – as it is supposed to do. And, on genuine PhotoPop designs, you don’t want to mess with things in the Layers panel – except, maybe, to work with the text and/or typography. Just upload a photo that fits what the original design was created for.