Realistic Shadows
Sunday, April 13th, 2008 
Its Tracy again, (you sick of me yet? lol) here to give you some shadow pointers. I have had a few compliments lately about my shadowing and thought I would share with you how I acomplish them. This is a tutorial for CS3 at the moment. I cant remember if CS2 had the option of creating a shadow layer, and I know it didnt exist before. I also dont know PS Elements. But, I assume that you can make a soft, grey, slightly transparent layer in the shape of your object, and do it that way. Ok, on now, here we go. (All images can be enlarged)
To illustrate what I am doing we are using a paper and the wand from Brittany’s wonderful “Her Royal Highness” kit. Available here at ScrapMatters. So this photo just kinda shows them sitting there. Now lets add a shadow.
Now here are the settings that I used. I dont have a set formula, other then I always trade the color black, for a grey. I stole the linear burn setting from Brittany’s last tutorial 
I just put the settings at whatever lookright to me, for that project.
…..Ok aparently my computer doesnt like to screen capture this pull down menu. Fine. We can do without…I hope. You are going to go over to your layers, and right click the shadow style, and tell it to “create layer”. You should go from A to B.
After that, select the new shadow layer. Go over to your photo and click on the dotted edge so that you get the solid edge. Again, A to B.
Once you’ve done that, you right click on the solid line, and when the menu pops up, choose “Warp”. This gives you a kind of grid over your photo (please make sure you did this on the SHADOW layer). Next you are going to use that grid to pull your shadow out from under your object.
As you will notice in my example, I used the selection tool to “section off” a point of the star. I find it easier to do this on most objects )like individual flower petals, or points to stars) rather then doing the entire object. Gives me more control. The key in doing it this way is keeping in mind WHERE your light source is. I admit I am really not the best at that, but I try. Just make sure you dont have horrible conflicting directions. Here is my finished wand.
And a layout from my gallery that shows a good use of this technique.
Well, I really hope that was informative. That was my first time writing a tutorial. I would also like to invite you to show me your pages using this technique. Join me in the forum http://scrapmatters.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?p=3311#3311 <–there. And show me what you can do with this tutorial Thanks for listening!! OH! And if you have any questions, or if I wasnt very clear in my tut, then you may join me at the forum and I will give you answers
