Thursday tutorial from Leah

Curious about how to create custom shadows on digi layouts?

Creative team member Leah shares her tips on adding dimension and depth to create realistic and visually stimulating digital layouts, using Photoshop Elements 6.0.

“Start by creating a new layout, and adding a background paper. I chose to use the Elanor2 paper from the new Elegance kit.

“Next add your photo or element that you’d like to shadow. I chose to tilt my photo a bit for this particular layout.”

“With your photo layer highlighted and your move tool selected, hold the control key and click inside the layer thumbnail. This will create a selection out of the layer and it’ll be surrounded by ‘marching ants’.”

“With your photo layer still highlighted in the layer palette, hold the control key and click on the new layer button. This will bring in a layer underneath your highlighted layer (in this case, your photo).”

“With your new layer highlighted, choose the paint bucket tool, and make sure your foreground color is set to black. Click inside the selection you created around the photo on your layout. It should fill in that selection on the new layer. Then go to “Select” in your top menu bar, and choose “Deselect.”

“With your new layer still highlighted in your layer palette, select your move tool and click on the small squares in the corner. They’re called transform handles, and if yours don’t appear with the move tool selected, just press control + t and they’ll pop up.

 ”Once you’ve clicked on them, you can use the arrows on your keyboard to make slight movements up or down.  In our case, we’re going to move two to the left, and two down.”

“As you can see, we’ve just created our shadow. Now, let’s make it a bit more realistic. Shadows don’t usually have hard edges, they’re softer. To make the edges softer, we’ll use a filter. In the top menu bar, select “filter” > “blur” > “Gaussin blur.”

“In the dialog box that appears, we’ll choose a radius of 3.4 pixels and click okay. Next, reduce the opacity to something around 50%, andyou’ve created a custom shadow!”

“Now for the final touch, we’ll make our photo look as though it’s lifting slightly off the page. Select your move tool again, and hover over your top left transform handle. Remember, if they’re not showing up, hold control + t.

“ Now, click on your top left transform handle, then hold the control key. This will cause your shadow to bend and warp in whichever direction you pull. In my case, I pulled slightly down and to the left. You can make other adjustments to the other corners until you achieve the effect you’d like.”

And this is the finished product…gorgeous!

Thanks so much, Leah, for sharing your tips on creating custom shadows!