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Every preview frame has its own rendering settings: how the artwork blends into the photo, and how much it follows the shape of the surface. Get these right and a flat design starts to look printed rather than pasted on.

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Where the settings are

Click a Design Preview frame, with nothing on it selected, and the settings appear in the right-hand panel.
The right-hand panel showing a Transition section with Instant, Slide, Fade, Slide + Fade and Zoom + Fade buttons, a Rendering section with a Blend Mode dropdown set to Normal, and a Surface Warp section with an Enable Surface Warp toggle and an Intensity slider.

The settings for the preview frame you clicked into.

If you see layer settings instead, you have a layer selected. Click an empty part of the preview frame to get back to the frame’s own settings.
Rendering and Surface Warp are saved per preview frame, so each product photo can be treated differently. Transition is one choice for the whole template.

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Rendering: blend mode

Blend Mode decides how your artwork mixes with the photo underneath. Multiply is the one worth learning. On a white mug or a heather t-shirt it lets the fabric texture and the shadow in a fold come through the ink, which is what makes a preview believable.
Blend modes only affect the preview. They never change the file that goes to your printer, so nothing here can spoil a print.

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Surface Warp

Real products aren’t flat. Surface Warp bends your artwork so it follows the curve of the product instead of lying across it like a sticker. Turn on Enable Surface Warp, then raise Intensity until the artwork sits convincingly. Intensity runs from 1 to 50 pixels, which is how far the artwork is allowed to shift to follow the surface.
  • A mug, a cushion, a rolled sleeve: try somewhere in the middle and adjust by eye.
  • A flat canvas, a poster, a card: leave it off. There’s nothing to bend around.
Nudge Intensity a little at a time and watch the preview. Too much and lettering starts to look wobbly, which reads as a printing fault to a shopper.
If a product needs more than this, such as artwork moulded onto a curved surface or hidden where it wraps out of sight, that detail belongs on the mockup itself. See Warp and realism.

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Transition

When your product page has several previews, Transition is the animation a shopper sees as they move between them. Fade or Slide + Fade suit most stores. Instant is the honest choice if you’d rather your product page felt fast than smooth.

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Where to next

Add a mockup preview

Add more product photos to your template.

Warp and realism

Mesh, displacement, and blending on the mockup itself.

The design and preview frames

Which canvas gets printed.

Assign products and go live

Put the template on a product page.