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© 2007 Rene' Bross
When you extract an image from a photograph to remove the unwanted
background and place the extracted image onto a new background,
you end up with a very flat looking image. To make it a little
more realistic, you should add a drop shadow. But to make it look
even more realistic, a Cast Drop Shadow is what you need!
I've already extracted my image from it's busy background and
placed it on a background paper here:
Now I will add a regular drop shadow. This looks ok and better
than no drop shadow at all:
But to give it an even more realistic effect, with the image
layer selected in the layers palatte box, Control-click (Mac)
or right click (PC) the drop shadow layer and select > Create
Layer > from the menu.
This puts the drop shadow onto it's own separate layer. Now you
can manipulate the drop shadow on it's own without effecting the
image of the boy.
With the drop shadow layer selected, go to edit/transform/skew.
Now use your move tool to drag the corners of the drop shadow
to the left a bit to skew it slightly. You can also scale
the shadow down a bit to make it seem like there is a light source
coming from above. Play with the skew and scale to get the look
you like. Here I’ve skewed and scaled down the shadow:
Now it really looks as though he is kneeling in front of
that background. Now finally, I'm going to pull back the opacity
of the shadow just a bit to lighten it.
That's it. You've created a cast drop shadow for a more realistic
look to your page. Now you can flatten the image or keep scrapping
to finish the page!
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