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Learn the Importance of Shadowing

Lesson 15 from: Layering in Adobe Photoshop for Digital Scrapbookers

Traci Reed

Learn the Importance of Shadowing

Lesson 15 from: Layering in Adobe Photoshop for Digital Scrapbookers

Traci Reed

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Lesson Info

15. Learn the Importance of Shadowing

Lesson Info

Learn the Importance of Shadowing

Let's talk about shadowing since we're here so I purposefully did not show this play out and it looks flat is when we I did shadow these parts that we didn't use but it looks so flat and why why is shadowing why shadowing is so important is that we want to create a lot of depth and texture in our layouts so let's talk about shadows let's talk about how the shadows are super puffy and we went into this a lot in depth in the shadowing class so we're going to use our they flower shadow when isn't there it is flowers but okay like we talked about in the chattering class there is not a lot going on you can't see that very well, so we're going toe um really take this shadow so the next level and we're gonna make it darker because when we're on white it's hard to see the shadows and shadows make or break your clusters you can have a beautiful cluster of embellishments, but if you're if we shadowed this flower with a paper shadow, it doesn't doesn't pop it doesn't give you any kind of death to...

the layout, so we're just going to make sure that we use appropriate shadows which you can learn all about in the shadow in class from yesterday for advances will scrap booking shadows so it's actually used the layer style his buttons oh, now let's talk about stacking order again this this is the leaf and we don't like that so we're going to move this down even further and we're gonna move the button up so that we don't see that leaf anymore and we still see it kind of coming out here so don't um don't be afraid to if you have it coming out the bat in the bottom and you don't want to move the leaf just a race it it's not going to hurt anything but you do have to rast arise at first if you're like me and you just drag things in and dropped them if you drag things in to photo shop and dropped them directly on your layer are on your way out they're going to be smart objects and that makes them, um editable down the line so let's say that I had this smart object this is a smart object you can tell by the little icon right here so let's say that I decided at some point that I wanted this to be small um and then I decided later that that they don't really work for me and I wanted to be big if you have a rast arised layer and yeah, you're going to lose the quality of let's make this one small since its rest arise we made a small and now when we make it big again he lose that you lose the quality and it gets blurry zoom in even though it was that big to begin with because we re sized down it re populated the pixels and then when we resize it back up again it was blurry. So what happens with smart objects? And this happens when you just directly drag your element onto your canvas and photo shop you don't drag it into the icon on the mac if you drag it into the iconic photo shop there you are if you drag it into the iconic photo shop, it will open its its own document, but if you drag it directly onto the layout it creates a smart object and you can with smart objects you can resize it down and then if you look after its resize down if you hit command t to transform it again, you can see that the whip isn't one hundred percent it's actually twenty five percent because it's kept the original proportions so you can resize us all the way back up to one hundred percent with no quality loss. Of course, if you go above one hundred percent, you're gonna start losing quality again so I like to use smart objects in my scribe looking so that I can resize oily millie and I can make it small and I could make a bagan without losing any quality so back to what we're talking about um don't be afraid to erase bits and pieces that don't work for you in your cluster this little bit in peace that's the amazing thing about digit e did you there's so much amazing stuff that weakened d'oh they undo button all of that is just perfect so anyway let's talk about shadows this is a totally inappropriate shadow and we want a wart shadows so if we, um let's talk about our shadow action from yesterday let's run that on this paper on this photo so we want tio projection snapped those back okay? Jacket in so this is the shadow action that we created yesterday and we're going to work this shadow to give it a little bit more a restaurant is it okay? We're going tio just give it a little bit more here's to make shadow lair and then this is the make shadow this is what I included with the downloads you can just make the shadow and this is the make shadow and warp I mean it's super easy for the downloads and so we can warp it and shadowing just makes all the difference now it looks like it's coming away from the page a little bit okay, take a oh any questions going on that's good. Yeah, I mean we have you have a question for policy girl was asking and a lot of people voted on this actually eight different people saying I'm sorry I'm going the wrong question claudia was asking how do you combine drawn elements with riel extracted elements oh wow I wish I had set up a canvass for that so really attractive elements we're talking about the things like flowers I'm assuming you okay um so I have something in here let's use okay let's use text instead of like a doodle is the same concept text um actually actually let's make a doodle let's just make a doodle it's super easy ok let's make a hard doodle good question ok so let's make way want to have our custom shape and we want to have the heart so let's tio let's just do all so we can find our heart there are a ton of custom shapes built in the photo shop there are arrows there are all sorts of things that you can use in your scrapbooking and here's the heart they're stars already actually don't like the stars I prefer to use the polygon tool because you can control all of the the angles so let's make a heart and of course the d's the default is to fill in the heart but we don't want that we want no phil and but we do want a stroke and that gives you a nice outlined heart which is essentially a doodle and I like tio align it to the middle I think it gives it better edges. Ok, so if we were having, if we have these doodles and let's say it was a nice little cluster of hearts in varying sizes it's a lot like a sticker it's going to be on the bottom and it's going tio if you put it on top of things like that doesn't make any sense so I'm going to combine doodles which I do often dio you wanted to be sort of like you drew it on the background paper so you wantto rotate it so it's coming off the cluster and I really like to use doodles as a way to lead your eye out of the cluster again so you can you can use it in this way to lead your eye out towards the the butterfly or you can even take some more and you can use them down here toe anchor the cluster more. I would probably want to get rid of that button in this case so we would move it here here, that button and it's important that you make sure that you can see what the what the heart is. If you push it all the way in here, it's just kind of looks like a line so with doodles, you want to make sure that you can you pull it out far enough that you can see it and then, actually, in this case, on this layout, I would make sure that I repeat this again following the rule of threes. At least have some hearts and every cluster just for that extra visual balance. Like he used to make sure that they are on the bottom you like. You're drawing that if you were paper scrap booking, you would draw them directly on the background paper. Now, with, um, making doodles of your own, you can always change the color. The stroke. Um, you can sample colors directly from your layout. Um, and you can you can even add patterns ingredients to your doodles as well. So you can, instead of having just a solid color. This obviously adds, harold let's, do a really harsh one that we can see really well, yes, because we totally want a christmas heart on this layout, but we can see it really well. You can add grady's if you have patterns, you can add patterns to your hearts as well. There's lots of different things that you can do with doodles and the custom shaped tool. But you're right. That totally added a lot to this layout. You can see all these adorable hearts now and that's how I would use doodles with the realistic stuff.

Class Materials

bonus material

Shadow Styles
Stitching Brushes
Stitching Styles

Ratings and Reviews

Corrina
 

I have recently discovered digital scrapbooking and have been using a great scrapbooking software that I downloaded on-line. There are limitations with the software that prompted me to look deeper for ideas. Traci's course was fantastic! I learned so much from her not only in scrapbooking layouts and using different elements in a page but my level of understanding of photoshop has improved dramatically. The presentation was easy to follow and broken into perfect chunks to go back and review the techniques. Thank you so much Traci for presenting this awesome course. I will look for more of your courses. Your scrapbooking is beautiful and inspiring!

ChristyWhitehead
 

I'm a photographer. I do a lot of graphic design for my business. I feel like I'm fairly knowledgeable. I saw this class being shown for free on Creative Live one day and it wasn't my first choice to watch, but was the best out of the list... I was wrong. This is a great class. I didn't expect to learn that much and I've been learning a lot! Great info!

LourdesM
 

This course was amazing. I learn some things I didn't know how to do. Traci is simple and straight forward in her teaching. Very easy to understand.

Student Work

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