Scraps Of Mind

Do you Customize your Drop Shadows?

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…or do you just leave them as the default?

Did you know that you can change the look of your drop shadows in your graphics editing program?

It’s very simple and frankly, I think it makes all the difference to your digital scrapbook layout. Anyone who is part of my Step by Step Digital Scrapbook Mentoring Program will know how much I love to customize my shadows. I think it makes for a more authentic look for the shadows. And sometimes (especially for titles) it can be a funky way of giving the text and extra color boost.

What do I mean?

Well when you click on any drop shadow in your Styles Pallet your graphics editing program will apply a shadow that’s a standard size and distance from your element and is black with a level of opacity reduction to make it look gray.

But in real life, shadows are not all gray. they take on the tone of the item that they are shadowing. And by the way, I’m not talking about the shadows thrown by the sun on the ground. I’m talking about the small shadows that surround an object if you put it on a surface. Look at the shadow of an object sitting on a table and you’ll see what I mean. I’m looking at an envelope sitting on my desk as I write this, and the shadow thrown on the desk is brown, not black or gray.

If you click on the layout above, you’ll see what I mean.

And the good news is that in most good editing programs you can control the parameters of your drop shadow.

So how do I do it?

I use Photoshop Elements 5 but the principles for doing this will remain true for PSP or CS I would think, although the terminology might be different. So here’s how you can customize the drop shadows in your own layouts.

• First activate your element layer in the Layers Pallet and then select a shadow from your Styles Pallet and click to apply it to your element.

• Now double click on the little ’sun’ or circle’ icon at the right of its layer in the Layers Pallet.

• You are presented with a Style Settings dialog box that allows you to play with the size of the shadow, the distance it sits away from your element and it’s opacity. You can vary these parameters by using the slider bars or by typing pixel sizes directly into the appropriate fields in the dialog box.

• You can also customize the colors of your shadows to match the color of your element or to create a funky effect. To customize the color of your shadow do this (note: this feature is not available in PSE4.
  • Click on the small color swatch box to the right of the size parameter in your Style Settings box.
  • The color picker box will open and you can move your mouse over your layout (it will turn into an eyedropper) and click on an area of your element which is the colour you want for your shadow.
  • You can click in the Color Picker to choose variations on this if you like and when you’re satisfied, click OK.
  • Note: For the most authentic look, always choose a darker tone of the color for your shadows.

• By playing with the Opacity slider in the Style Settings box you can make the shadow lighter or darker.

• When you have the shadow look you want click OK.

It’s as easy as that. And your shadows will look a lot more realistic.

A note to users of PSE versions earlier than 5. You don’t have the ability ot change the color of your drop shadows in these earlier versions. When I used PSE4 I used to make a duplicate of the element and apply the shadow to the lower layer. Then I reduced the opacity of that layer so that shadow would look softer.

Don’t forget, you can also use this technique to go to the other end of the scale and make your shadow totally unrealistic by picking a contrasting color, just to spice up your title a bit. This can be a very cool look for your title and I often use this technique in my Word Art for the Weekly Word Art Newsletter (see the top of this page to subscribe to this free newsletter).

I hope you find this scrapbooking tip useful. And if you did, why not share it with other scrapbookers by telling them about this article (you are very welcome to link to the article), or Stumbling it, bookmarking it in Delicious or giving it a vote on Kirtsy.

So back to the original question: do you customize you drop shadows? Leave a comment and let us know.