Do you admire the way some shadows just make an image POP off the page? It’s something you can easily recreate in photoshop yourself! Ready? I’ve got a quick, fun, easy tutorial for you today, with a little freebie tucked in at the end.
Note: This tutorial assumes basic knowledge of Photoshop and the Layers Palette
- Open a background paper
- Add your photo on a new layer
- Add an inside white stroke to frame your photo:
- Add a drop shadow to your photo:
- In order to manipulate the shadow to POP, go to your Layers Palette–> right-click on the fx symbol next to your photo layer and click Create Layers
- Leave the Inner Stroke clipped to your photo
- Click on the Drop Shadow layer under your photo
- Go to Edit–>Transform–>Warp
- Gently drag each bottom corners down with your mouse to get the desired POP effect with your drop shadow
You can now adjust the opacity of the shadow in your Layer Palette, or even add more blur: Filter–>Blur–>Gaussian Blur to get just the look you want for your POP drop shadow.
Start with your image on a background paper. This is my mom in Fátima, the paper is from the free Blog Hop mini in May.
Add an inner border in the Layers Palette in white, as fat or as thin as you like!
Add a drop shadow in your Layers Palette. You can experiment with size, blurriness & darkness now or later.
In your Layers Palette right click on your image with the “fx” and choose Create Layer.
Use the warp tool on your new drop shadow layer to drag down both bottom corners for the POP effect.
You can lighten the shadow in the Layers Palette by reducing the Fill or Opacity.
Photoshop Elements does not have the warp feature. You can achieve similar results by using the Liquify Tool and distorting a black layer underneath your photo’s. In the meantime, you can download a free copy of my POP shadow frame (layered TIF file only):
Click Image to download & enjoy a layered POP shadow frame!
The photo does really pop with your technique! Thank you!
When I add more than one layer effect and want the drop shadow separate, I move all the other effects to another layer or a new, blank layer, temporarily. Just click and hold on each of the effects and drag them where you want. I separate out the drop shadow, then, move the other effects back.
Su
This is a great tip Su! I do that frequently as well, create a “hold” layer for all the styles so I can just separate out the one I want to play with… or “copy style” and then delete all the styles BUT the drop shadow, then “paste style” to get everything back (minus the drop shadow, of course).
I use PSE14 and liquify was very hard to control and I couldn’t get sharp corners. I found it worked to copy the photo, fill with desired dark shadow color, put it below the photo, then use the image transform/distort tool to drag the bottom down and out a bit. Then I used the polygonal lasso tool to select the part of the edge that I wanted shaped diagonally toward the center and deleted it. Then used gaussian blur. The description sounds harder than it is, but it worked much better for me.
I only have PSE7, and I never could get it to work properly for me. This should be very helpful to our PSE users. Thanks Peggy!
Awesome tutorial, thanks a lot for sharing and the download.
You are very welcome!
Thank you, I always forget the power of warp in this instance.
Faith
x
thank you! I have tried this unsuccessfully before and your instructions have made all the difference. whoo hoo!