MellowButterfly Team Blog

As you’ve become more familiar with digital scrapbooking and your layouts have become more complex, you’ve probably noticed that something’s not quite right.

Maybe with your shadows perhaps? Especially on those multi-dimensional elements like flowers and leaves and butterflies? Yes?

You’d be right, of course. These elements don’t sit flat like paper, so their shadows would be different. When you look at real paper embellishments, you see that they stand out from the paper and cast a very different shadow – often longer and darker and differently shaped.

This tutorial explains how to get a more convincing three-dimensional effect with your digital elements in Photoshop.

While the instructions are step-by-step, a working knowledge of Photoshop’s tools and layers would be advisable.

Make your layout, or, if you’re just practicing, put a couple of 3D elements like leaves and flowers onto a paper and position them as you would in a scrapbook layout. It may help to label all your layers, i.e., “flower”, “leaf 1″, “leaf 2″, etc.



Select your move tool and click on your first element (in my case, the flower). Make sure you check the “Auto Select Layer” box to make selecting your different layers a bit easier – it saves you having to scroll through a hundred layers before you find the one that you want. You will see in the Layers palette that that the layer on which the element sits is automatically selected. Duplicate this layer!



With the duplicated layer still active, go to your Image menu and select Adjustments – Brightness/Contrast. Pull the Brightness slider down all the way to -100. Pull the Contrast slider all the way to +100. Voila! You have a black blob in your layout.



In your layers palette, drag this blob below the original element. With the blob layer still active, head on over to your Edit menu and select Transform – Warp. You’ll get a crazy looking grid that comes up over your element, like so:



Now, with your mouse, click on one of the points and drag away from the edge of the element. You’ll see that the black blob beneath will warp. Play with all of the dots in the grid until you get a close approximation of the shadow you desire. Remember that anything goes here, just make sure that all your shadows are falling away from the same light source in the same direction. (You can also drag any part of the grid lines as well for even more control over your shadow.)



Apply your warp and you’ll see that you now have a very solid looking shadow beneath your element:



With the blob layer still active, go to your Filter menu and select Blur – Gaussian Blur. Play with the sliders until you get a nice softness to the edge of the shadows and then apply.

Now that you’ve got a nice soft shadow, change the blend mode on the blob layer to Multiply and pull the opacity down to what looks good to you. (Remember, you can always go back to the shadow layer and tweak it with the warp tool again to get the shape and shadowing effecting you desire.):



Now do the same thing for the rest of your 3D elements and voila! Perspective Shadow in just a handful of easy steps.

I hope you found this tutorial useful! Remember, Michelle and her ‘Fly Girls would love to see any layouts you might use this in, so leave us a link in the comments!

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 17th, 2008 at 2:20 am and is filed under Tutorials. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.