Quick Tip Tuesday – The Shadow Stands Alone

I’ve been playing with shadows a lot lately, and in order to get good effects you need to get the shadow onto it’s own layer.  In PS this is easy: add the shadow the usual way, right click on the little “fx” on the layer and choose Create Layer.  Ta-daaa – shadow is now on it’s own layer ready to be manipulated.

But what about PSE users?  They don’t have this fun, quick shortcut!

Well, it’s still easy.  I know there are people selling actions to do this, but once you get the idea, it’d take just as long to load and run the action as it would to just do it!  Here’s how:

1. Duplicate the layer you want to put the shadow on. (Right click on the layer and choose Duplicate Layer).  Click on the new layer to make it active.

2. Select everything on the bottom of the two layers by holding your CTRL key and clicking on the thumbnail in the layers palette.

3. Fill with black. (If black is your foreground color, hold ALT and press the backspace key)

Now you have a shadow directly underneath the item casting it.  All you have to do is move it, and adjust it.  The trick is knowing where to move it and how to manipulate it!

There are some key principles to remember:

• The shadow will need to be moved in the opposite direction of where the light  is coming from.  Look for highlights on the object if you are not sure, they will be on the light side.  Move the shadow to the opposite side.

• When the object casting the shadow is close to the background, the shadow will be darker and sharper.
• When the object casting the shadow is far from the background, the shadow will be lighter and blurrier.

To accomplish this, you need to warp the object or the shadow so that part of it is farther away.  In PS you can use Edit>Transform>Warp.

In PSE you will want to hold your control key and drag one corner of the bounding box to distort. You could also use the liquify filter to move it, but you have to be careful about distorting it too much.

Now you can run the Gaussian Blur filter to blur the whole shadow some, and use the Blur tool to blur the portion of the shadow farther from the object even further.

To lighten the blurry end, I tend to use the eraser tool with a large soft brush and the opacity set at about 15%.

I know that sounds like a lot of work, but really it’s very simple:

Duplicate layer
Select object
Fill with black
Blur filter
Move and Warp
Blur more in places
Lighten in places

Give it a whirl, you’ll find that the natural element kits that are so popular these days really lend themselves to this technique!

Happy Scrapping!

Jenn

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