3D Box Art

Start by acquiring the artwork for the cover of the box. In my example, I scanned the front cover and the side of a WarCraft III (by Blizzard Entertainment) box. I included the side image because it will be in view. If you'd like to use my images, download them:

Front Cover
Side Cover

Open a new document with a white background. For best results, you may want to make your image a good bit larger than my example and scale down the final result to your desired size. Create a new layer and go to Filter>Render>3D Transform. Click on Options and make sure Display Background is checked. Select the Cube Tool (), and draw a box. Focus on making the right panel the correct side for the face of the box. Then select the Direct Selection Tool () and click and drag the lower left corner in until the dimensions resemble a software box.

Select the Trackball Tool () and spin the box around until you have something similar to what I have to the left. You may need to adjust the Dolly slider to scale it up or down in size. The important thing is that you end up with a box that has three distinct sides, each in a different shade of gray.

Open your front cover artwork, hit V to select the Move Tool, and drag the artwork into the document with the box. Hit Ctrl+T (Mac: Command+T) to bring up the Free Transform outlines. Shrink the front cover just small enough to completely fit into your document. You may need to enlarge the border of your document or move the cover art around to find the corners. (To preserve proper dimensions, you can click on a corner and hold down the Shift key as you are resizing it). Hit Enter to apply the transformation. Tap 3 to reduce the opacity of the cover layer to 30%.

Go to Edit>Transform>Distort. Click and drag the corners of the cover to the corresponding corners of the front of the box.

Repeat steps 4 and 5 for the image of the side cover. Distort it to fit on the left side of the box. Then increase the opacity of both the front and side layers back to 100% by tapping 0 after selecting each layer.

Fill in the remaining areas of the box in a color that goes matches the cover (black in the example). The easiest way is to select the layer with the gray box, hold Ctrl (Command) and click the layer in the Layers Palette, create a new layer, and fill the selection with black by hitting D followed by Ctrl+Backspace (Command+Delete). Hide the layer with the gray boxes by clicking on the eye left of it in the Layers Palette. Hmm, not too shabby.

To finish it off, I corrected the color of the front cover a little by going to Image>Adjustments>Channel Mixer and adjusting the sliders for the red and green output channels. Then, I selected the layer with the solid black box shape, right-clicked it in the Layers Palette, chose Blending Options, and applied this Drop Shadow.