Tutorial: Drop Shadows Tips

Another SA tutorial...

Here are a few tips to help improve your drop shadows:

- Try your opacity at 50% to start with. This is a good figure for many LOs/papers/elements etc....but feel free to change it to fit your LO.
-You may want a higher percentage for dark papers so it is more noticeable.
-You may want a lower percentage for light papers
- If you're element is 'high' off the page...increase the size (fuzziness) and lighten it (lower opacity) to make it more real. In real life shadows at a distance are not as sharp or dark.
-You can have coloured drop shadows if you like (if you're program allows) or you can use the standard black drop shadow with lowered opacity. This will allow the colour of the underlying paper to show through anyway.
-Sharp shadows are only for the midday sun...not your LO.
-Decide where you want the 'light' to come from for your LO, and make all the shadows head away from the light. Ie. don't change the angles of your drop shadows...keep them all the same within a LO or it won't look right.

- Your shadows SHOULD NOT be the focus of your page. In fact, they should barely be noticeable. People don't want to look at your page and say "ooohh..nice shadows!". The shadows should just be there to make the rest of the page look better..and hopefully one day, somebody will have to ask you if it is real or digi!

-look at real shadows and try to imitate them. I use this technique a lot lately. DH will be watching golf or some other crap and so i stare around the room looking at how the light affects everything! How it changes colours, how it creates shadows etc!

Here are some examples from the Scrap Addicts gallery. I'm going to use Melissa's LO's as I've already been through these tips with her using her own work as examples. Hopefully she won't mind!

Firstly here is a paper LO. You can see the shadows on the chipboard letters are quite dark and big but they are quite fuzzy. The shadows on the papers are barely noticeable, but they are there and they tell your brain that this Lo is paper.


This digi LO is when Melissa was playing around with her shadows trying to perfect them. It is good, but when you look at it, the shadows really pop out at you. We want the papers to pop off the page not the shadows and it is because they are too dark and too big.

And this is a new one of Melissa's. You really have to look to even see the drop shadows and that is great! They make the papers and elements pop, yet in themselves they are not a feature of the LO. Beautiful!

And in case she doesn't hate me enough already...here is a LO with a common drop shadow mistake - making the drop shadow go all the way around. You show me anything in real life where the shadow shows from all around the object. This is because the 'size' was too high.

Tutorial: Drop Shadows basics

Ever wondered how digi pages sometimes look so real? Well when you look at a paper LO, you don’t notice them but there are shadows everywhere. They are subtle but they are there and our brain interprets the shadows as making the layout 3-dimensional and therefore … real.

So to imitate reality in digital scrapbooking, you need to get the drop shadows right. There are no set rules, and some people like them bigger or darker than others so play around and see what you like.
The instructions are very different for PS and PSE so I will treat them separately.

Basic guidelines: Thinner elements that are close together need thin drop shadows. For example a piece of paper sits very close to the cardstock, so has very little shadow.
Thicker elements or those that you want to stand off the page, need bigger shadows. For example a chipboard alpha or if you want the look of a flower lifted up with a pop dot.
In real life, shadows are not pure black, so your digital shadows should not be either. Either lower the opacity so that the underlying colour and texture shows through, or make the shadow a darker hue of the element underneath it. For example, if your flower is on a red paper, your shadow would be a very dark red colour (if your program allows coloured shadows).

PSE 6 (and hopefully the other recent versions)
Click on the layer of the element you want to use. Under the Effects Palette, click on the symbol for Layer Styles. In the drop down menu, click Drop Shadows. Double click LOW, then double click SOFT EDGES. This will give you a nice, basic drop shadow which you can then adjust if you want to.

To adjust your drop shadow, go to the Layers palette and double click the ‘fx’ icon. (This only shows if you have used an ‘Effect’ on your layer.) A menu will pop up where you can change the size of the shadow and the distance. Increasing the size will soften it, and increasing the distance will make a bigger shadow ie your element ‘pops’ off the page more.
You can also change the opacity and lighting direction to give you even more control.

PS
Click on the layer of the element you want to use. At the bottom of the layers palette is a Layer Style icon – an ‘f’ in a circle. Click it and choose Drop Shadow and a pop up menu will appear. Firstly click on the black box at the top. Use the eye dropper tool to click on your underlying element – ie the paper etc that is directly under the element you are working on. Now change your colour to a much darker tone by clicking underneath the point it gave you. Now adjust your distance and size following the above guidelines. The distance will move the shadow away from your element – imitating an element lifted off the page. The size will soften your shadow to make it more realistic. Sharp lines are only for the midday sun which is unlikely to shine on your digital layout!

Without shadows:
With shadows: