Hi Fran, FranB Designs, here! I’m one of the Designers of the LAD: Winter Whites. I created several frosted glass elements that have already been handed out in the daily prizes, including: an arrow, castle & snowflake. Today there’s  a frosted glass tree. I’ve done a quick little tutorial on one way to shadow translucent (glass) elements to help them stand out.

STEP ONE

  • Place your glass element in desired location & duplicate it.

STEP TWO

  • Add your drop shadow to one of the layers.

STEP THREE

  • Rasterize the shadowed layer; then
  • Select the element on the non-shadowed layer.
    • either by control-click on the thumbnail; or
    • by using the magic wand outside the element; and then
    • inversing the marching ants.
  • Since the object is transparent, the control-click may not capture the full elements.

STEP FOUR:

  • Go back to the layer that is shadowed; and
  • Hit your delete key
    • this will create a shadow without elements on the layer,
    • whilte the element stays on the copy layer

STEP FIVE

  • Merge your two layers

Now you have a shadow around your element, but not behind your element. You can now see the “Glass” transparency without it turning dark from the shadow.

The top image is adding a drop shadow. The bottom image is our outside only shadow. You can really see the difference with the white background.