Catalog > Craft & Maker > Scrapbooking Ideas > Shadowing In Adobe Photoshop For Digital Scrapbookers > Applying Layer Styles To Your Page
Shadowing in Adobe Photoshop for Digital Scrapbookers
Lesson 6 of 17
Applying Layer Styles to Your Page
Now let's talk about later styles what do we need to d'oh teo make a later sell they're actually pretty simple but we need to have you ever had photoshopped crash on you yeah and then you lose all your layer styles so we need to make sure that we save them because that's that'll be a problem I had so many layer styles get lost before that is just it's sad so layer sounds were actually super easy and let's get rid of these crazy later styles that come with photo shop yeah you just hold that you hold down option or alter and click yeah so on your list ok so let's go back tio our original paper so let's say the layer style it's super easy I got dio is beyond the layer with the layer style and then click in later south out you have the click on something like not on the actual layer style and then make sure you name a right so there's going to my paper layer style I can type and then we moved to doily same process and we go all the way down the line chipboard until we have them all saved m...
ake sure that you give them names it's really easy to not just let him name style one cell to but how are you ever gonna remember down the line flowers once you have them all saying we want to save all of them for this once you have them all saved in this pallet, all you have to do is go into your preset manager and click on the first one that you want to save and then shift. Click on the last one that you want to save and then save set and make sure that you save them somewhere that you can find them. I normally I have a little file, but even save them to your desktop or your scrapbooking folder. Wherever works for you, tracy shadow styles and then you had done, and no, let me get rid of them. And if I go to the desktop there's my style's now all you have to do to load him again later when you lose him his drag it and drop it and they're there. You don't have to import. You don't have to go through the palate or anything. Okay, so who wants to layer real things? Let's, let's look let's, look for let's. Open up some scrapbooking pages and start scrapbooking riel stuff. Ok, so we're gonna be working with two shadows today. Her two layers today lay out today and these are the ones that I showed in the slide show and they had no shadows on him some for one that I missed, um, so let's talk about I have flair and I have flowers and leaves and die cuts and paper and vellum, and we've got it all in here, so we're going to go through and we're going to shadow things and we're gonna just shadows and we're gonna learn how tio, how to fix things like with our our standard layer styles, they're not always going to work, and we're gonna learn why? So, um, let's, start with this layout and we're gonna we're gonna work on this play out for the rest of the segment, and we're going to really start going in and shadowing everything, so I like to start at the bottom. I like to build my shadows the higher by go. So I always start with the papers and the paper objects, and then I will work on the more puffy things. So I'm gonna go in here and apply the layer style, and you can see black background. We talked about that, um, it's pretty, pretty ah dull. You can't see it very well. So in this instance, we're gonna have to deviate from our layer style and make it a bit darker to be able to see it. So while even if we go up two hundred percent on a black paper it's kind of necessary, so, um if you really need a really hard shadow on a black paper and and cutting I'm playing it's one hundred percent isn't doing it for you you can also take the distance out a little bit you can see as I have the distance you can see it coming out more from the paper I'm gonna leave it where it was because I don't think that any speak to ours ok so now um I want to apply the same layer style to this other paper because they're exactly the same so I'm going to right click and copy the layer style and then right click on the layer I want to shadow and pace later style and um makes it easy so you don't have to mess with the settings every time now if I want tio shadow um okay, so when I want to shadow these this vellum we're going to have the same issue that we had when it was in the example so um if I just going here to multiply and if I use the same paper style that I have before or for the actual paper it's going to be pretty harsh fifty it's going to darken my valium a lot and I want my villain to be more true so the color it is so we're gonna goto linear burn and we're gonna drop it way down so you can just start to see the shadow forming and they're here that's probably pretty good. Now we have some definition in our vellum itself. It's not a kn shadowed, but we didn't muddy it up. And then we have these cards. We could just use the normal paper shadow for these because their paper objects. And then the snapshot banner is also paper object. But you can see that that's kind of because it's it's black it kind of is a little bit too dark for my liking, so I'm gonna make it a little bit smaller so that it's not muddying up the edges of that banner so much lower the opacity of it and then dropped the pixels down. So that is not as harsh, so as you can see, even within paper objects, you have to change things up and you can't just apply the same layer styled everything. So what happens if you want to have a stroke around your photo for a border and you also want a shadow? You can see that if we have a stroke that's on the outside and then we try and add a shadow it the stroke starts to block the shadow, so we have to make it super big and super floating away, but I don't like to do that, so I like to apply my strokes to the inside or even the center. Of the photo so that way you can see that when we left that big old shadow on there and we moved it to the inside um now the shadow is huge so drop back down to five I love using strokes for quick and easy shadows I mean quick and easy frames I think they can bring your, um your photo out from the background and really make it stand out now I don't know if you noticed, but you can if you want to apply the same layer style tio something else you don't want to right click you can also take this fx and click on it even drag it to another photo so if I were al did something not shadow so if I wanted to take this paper shadow and apply it to this he just click it and drag it and I'll take all the same shadow settings and drop it on something else. I do that a lot I did it without even thinking about it and I can probably talk about that and then let's apply our lace doily shadow. Now this is not showing up very well I think on this background paper because the background papers so dark so lets out a little bit more depth to this in fact, we can almost now if I apply the paper shadow too it's too dark it's floating too far away but we can adjust it and make it probably a three on two and then take the linear burn now a little bit okay so um you can see that that gave it a nice shadow and but it's not too harsh the way it was before so if I go back you can see the difference we don't like that ok so let's talk about some more of the flutie objects let's start with a flare help me both shadow I should have saved all of my shadow styles let's go back up so let's talk about flair and we're gonna add the drop shadow um just like the the flare that we shadowed originally which was fifty percent twenty five and ten and you would think that'd be super harsh and I actually mentioned that that it was so big but when you actually look at it on the paper it looks right I was so surprised I was like oh I'm gonna have to change that one no you know what the change it looks good so normally the way that I was shadowing flare was super small in the distance with a small size two so it looks that was right to me but it's not right it doesn't look realistic so um the flare shadow and let's do the button shadows now the buttons like I said, we're crazy right there huge shadow near bern forty five and fifteen in about thirteen but it's right now I was just I was kind of flabbergasted when I realized how I had been using such small shadows and thought it was right because I thought that if you use bigger shadows you were over shadowing and it would look really unrealistic we've all seen the layouts that have the huge shadows in leg wow, but that's right? So I'm gonna drag this over to the other button I think that's really two buttons I have let's do the enamel dots. This is where layer style layer styles come in handy. I don't have to do this every time now on this black flower it might look a little bit dull, but let's look at the same style on the white flower you can see the difference how it's really effective on that flower but on this flower is not quite dark enough, so we're going to go in and, uh up the distance in the size just a touch so that we can see it better so we're breaking rules. We're not doing the same thing every time we're adjusting for different variations and lay out we are going with the flow and we're not letting this well paper always has to be this exact shadow every single time and enameled ops can ever be different because everything is casting the same shot all right our everything has the same layers are the same light source it's true but things can very within the layout no speaking of light sources let's talk about the light source um what did I say that the degrees were for that are light source to remember e ok so where is this light source coming from doesn't look like one twenty to me okay so um with this graph looking you have um a problem because different designers design their stuff differently right? Everybody designs their own way with their own light source and so you can kind of get stuck in this place of well my light source always has to be perfect and all of my enamel dots and all of my flair and all of my highlights have to come from acing direction but what happens if you have a flair that has a light source over here but the words prevent you from flipping it so that the light source is correct because he would have to flip it backwards and then the words went backwards what do you d'oh do you freak out? Yeah you freak out I don't forget you're going to have that problem and it's not a big deal in fact the only person that is ever going to notice that your light source was wrong and I guarantee you give it a couple of months and you won't notice that the light source was wrong however, there are some things that you can adjust like the's enamel dots all you have to do is rotate them a little bit and if you hold down shift while you rotate, rotate and even increments so thirty degrees looks about one hundred one hundred twenty to me. So these highlights look about right to me at one hundred twenty degrees and then we have one more enamel dot, so if you hold it down shift and rotate in increments, it makes it so that you can rotate them all the same, which is nice or you can also hit if you're just rotating command shift t and oh, here we go rotate thirty if you hit command shifty, it'll transform again the exact same we transformed before so rotating moving, re sizing all of that command shifty and it will do exactly what you did before which it comes in really helpful, really handy when you're re sizing photos or papers and you want them all to be the same. Okay, so let's, look at these flowers. Oh, flowers! They always give me the biggest headache I don't use it's funny, I don't use flowers and paper scrap booking, but you can't not use them in digital scrapbooking they're everywhere and even on my boy layouts there's always gonna be flowers, so if we double click open up the drop shadow I don't know why after ten years I looked for it every single time where did it go? And you find the drop shadows there and they've never seen they've never moved, but I don't retain it, so we've got linear burn in forty five, fifteen and thirty, which actually it's pretty decent, yeah, it's a lot healthier than I normally would be a lot farther away from the layout, but supply it to the other ones, okay, so I'm not quite sure I like the way it looks on that one with the light green flower underneath it and the way that the shadows cast, I think it's a little dark personally and it looks really harsh on that green a flower in a way that it doesn't look on the other ones, so we're going to go in and we're gonna break rules and we'll make him different so let's, drop the capacity down of it, which already looks better to me and then we're gonna drop the distance down just a touch and we're going to increase the size, which will soften the edges of the shadow a little bit. Well, not too much, though, and we can probably bump that up a little bit so it's a little less harsh to me it looks a little bit more realistic and less distracting on the layout if you even if the rial shadow and really life is harsh sometimes it can be distracting on your layout if it's just in the right company should that way like what that leaves it was too dark on that leaf but it's ok on this leaf because the leaf is is coming from the light source where is on this one down here it's coming from that's on the shadow side so now we're gonna take those the next level we're gonna work on later but for right now those look those work for me we had a good question coming from the area actually in a few people voted on this so when you're shadowing acrylic embellishments to use the same as you would for vellum paper since they're both share, they both have that shine or do you handle them completely differently? I handle them differently and I actually can open up acrylic and do that actually thought I had a critical view, huh? Ok, so let's talk about acrylic this is a kind of it's a rough acrylics so it's not completely acrylic but it's the same concept so let's apply the vellum shadow and see what happens shadow still knew much it's like that boring, so um it doesn't give enough definition to me it doesn't define the edges enough so what I typically dio for acrylic keep the opacity really low because again, you're going to muddy up the acrylic just like you would the vellum but I take the distance a lot higher and this just for example, might be a little too high but so we can see the difference we can drop it down again. It's gonna have somewhat of a hard edge because it's it's got hard edges s o we wanted to have a smaller size than distance and let's chop this to send down a little bit and that's more effective to me then let's go back to the vellum shadow. You can't really see it as well, it's such a subtle difference. But when you have it's a letter, so if you spell out an entire title, you're gonna have a really big chunk of space as the shadows and you want to make sure that it, um, is more visible let's talk about washing while we're here to a little washy. Ok, so this washi tape now what's the thing about washy besides shadowing that is always a problem. Do we know it is, um making it look realistic, like tape really would when it's going over the edges of things. So when you have yeah, when you have tape going over the edge of something there's gonna be a bump, you're right there's a bump so we're going to talk about how to make that bump and really quickly and easily but we're not doing it today so I know that the uaw she's not gonna look completely right however let's talk about the shadow now in real life this is a rule we're gonna break while she's not going to make a shadow it's stuck to the baber but when you you can see that in photo shop it looks like floating because there's no shadow so we want to really small shadow but we want a shadow I think we should start counting the number of times I say shadow in this course shadow shadow shadow so we're going to go to when you burn again twenty percent and then let's start with three and three so super subtle but it makes all the difference because it doesn't look like it's just pasted on there it looks a lot more realistic, so if I turn it off into difference, you could see how it gets a little bit darker but this right here where it's going over the paper does not look right. It needs to have some sort of bump, so I'm really excited to get to that tomorrow in tomorrow's course okay, so back to our layout well here let's copy this layer style or here you can copy layer styles from um document a document doesn't have to be on the same document so let's apply to this tape over here so we'll have to do it again here we go now let's talk about this funky currently ribbon so before we get into the warping it's not gonna look and correctly are perfectly correct because it's being held down by the button so where it's being held down by the button it's going to be close to the paper so we're gonna have to warp it but we can start by giving it an eye shadow toe work with s so we're going to go to say with me lennier burn on we're gonna d'oh thirty percent twenty five and fifteen which is a nice height away from the paper it's floating in space right now we're gonna have to make it touch the paper but it looks good right now this ribbon down here can have my paper shadow because it's also touching the paper just like the heart touching the background just like the paper would and here is some vellum I just added everything to this layout but luckily um I normally make all of these products and one kid like I like to have a lot of texture and link it so I could just pull from one for this okay so drop shadow okay vellum twenty percent hopefully near burn twenty percent fifteen but that's right five and five so now you can see that if I drop this, or if I bumped, the shadow up gets super dark, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. With a colored about them. With a white vellum, it'll will make the white muddy. But with the colored vellum it's actually not too bad of an idea. You can play with the colored vellum more than can the white vellum, because it doesn't get money. It just kind of gets darker. So it just depends on how much he wanted to stand out, which I don't want it to stand out that much. So we're going to go back to twenty percent.
Learn how to create more polished and photorealistic scrapbook layouts with Traci Reed in Shadowing in Adob® Photoshop for Digital Scrapbookers.
Shadowing adds depth and perspective to scrapbook layouts, but stock Adobe® Photoshop® shadow effects can look artificial. In this class, you'll learn techniques that make adding and modifying shadows a simple process that yields believable results. Traci will teach you how to create shadows that fit the texture and composition of the elements you are using and look great on the screen and the printed page.
The anatomy of Adobe Photoshop shadows
Realistic shadowing of objects
Options for adding finishing touches
If you want to create more photorealistic pages, produce product for sale, or just take your design skills to the next level join Traci for Shadowing in Adobe®Photoshop for Digital Scrapbookers.
For even more advanced scrapbooking tips check out Layering in Photoshop for Digital Scrapbookers & Design Layouts in Photoshop.
Why You Should Scrapbook Digitally
The Scrapbooking Journey
Shadows & Behind Your Scrapbook in Adobe® Photoshop®
The Anatomy of Shadows in Adobe® Photoshop®
Explore how shadows work in real life so you can create more believable shadows in Adobe® Photoshop®.
Shadowing Paper & Flat Objects
Realistic Flat Object Shadowing
Recoloring Shadows in Adobe® Photoshop®
Extraction with the Pen Tool
Building the Layout with Extracted Images
Warping with the Smudge Tool in Adobe® Photoshop®
Distort Shadows with Wavelength
Making an Action in Adobe® Photoshop®
Warp Shadows with Transform Tool
Warp Shadows with Gradient Tool
Intro to the Adobe® Photoshop® Puppet Warp Tool
Creating Effective Inner Shadows in Adobe® Photoshop®
I bought all three of Traci's classes and am very impressed. Even though I consider myself a professional Photoshop user, I learned some great new tips and tricks. Not only that, I found the classes inspiring and it kicked my digital scrapbooking creativity up a few levels. More than worth the money. Easy to watch, inspiring and a great teacher.
L. Phillips
This class was fascinating and moved at a good pace. Scrapbookers these days use so many varied Photoshop skills and are some of the most creative thinkers around. I learned so many practical - use it right now! - tricks for shadowing any kind of object and make styles out of them for one-click usability. There's a bit much of the biography section at the front of the class but I felt the usable information was enough to warrant the purchase so I can skip the personal section. Traci is a friendly and clear speaker, and a wealth of knowledge. She should definitely be featured in more advanced scrapbooking classes AND even for creating vector embellishments!
a Creativelive Student
Awesome class! WOW, I had no idea about the world of shadowing. I just started digital scrapbooking and knew my layouts were lacking something and now I know what...depth! I definitely feel more confident now in adding shadows to my pages and I have also graduated from Elements to the full version of PS thanks to Traci's suggestion. I am headed now to search for more classes by Traci. Thanks for a great class!