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As an experienced paper-scrapper, one thing that has always irritated me was creating realistic shadows for my digital layouts. No matter what setting I used, nothing really looked right… until I found a little option called “scale”. So this month, you will be learning how to create more accurate shadows for your digital projects.
Now you may be asking, what is the difference – a shadow is a shadow, right? Actually, the default shadows in Elements create a shadow that gives the effect of an item being raised off the page with a pop-dot (piece of foam sandwiched between two layers of paper). Sometimes, this may be the effect we want, but if you are layering papers it doesn’t really look natural.
In this example (shown above), I used the same elements so that you can see exactly what the difference can be. The flower with “no shadows” actually looks more like a regular stickers placed on a regular piece of paper. The flower with the default “low shadow” looks like there is something between the layers holding them apart. The final flower with “scaled shadows” looks like it has been created with real papers.
So what is the trick to get the shadows like this? Do you just adjust the shadow level when you click on the little (F) button in the layers palette? Lets take a look at that option now. When you double-click on the little “F” symbol for the layer where the shadow is applied, a “Style Setting” box will pop up “Default” shadow distance setting is 21px for the low shadow. ‘Scaled” shadow distance setting is 4px with the same low shadow applied When I adjust the default shadow slider to give me a setting of 4px, the flower appears lower to the page, but it also has a fuzzy appearance around the out edges
While the adjusted still looks better than the default shadow, it is not something that you would actually find if you were to make this project out of real paper. In the image below, the flower with the “adjusted” shadow seems a bit out-of-focus (blurred around the edges)… and yet it is the same element used to create both items, and the same shadow depth according to the style settings.
I don’t know about you, but I like to have nice, crisp edges on my digital paper layouts. It could be the fact that personally, I am just way too picky, but I do like to have my layouts look like they were made by hand. That’s not such a bad thing, right?
So now, I have showed you how to scale your shadows so that you too can create more realistic projects. This method works for well for both the low shadow and soft shadow options.
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