Photo Shopping Shadows

[wyrd_fish]

does anyone have any good tips conserning shadows???

(see clown)

i made this clowns shadow by copying his picture again, dropping the alpha, contrast and brightness, then giving it a bit of a blur and perspective.

[BFCA]

the shadow's fine, but it looks tlike the normal picture doesnt quite go with thwe background, which porbably cant be helped anyway. The more important question is why is the clown meant to be there eh?

[wyrd_fish]

to balance the plane, duh!

[scram]

The way I normally do a shadow is thusly:

1) Select the outline of the object
2) Create a new layer below the object and fill the selection with an arbitrary colour like grey, red or octarine.
3) Skew the "shadow" to the desired size
4) Magic wandify the shadow area and then Do a "New Layer via copy" on the background.
5) Delete the shadow layer and you have a background shaped shadow.
6) Increase contrast and reduce brightness to a heavy extent on the new shadow layer
7) Blur the shadow layer slightly
8) Reduce the opacity of the layer using the slider until it looks right to you.
9) Have a beer

I'll try and post an example of this later when i get home from uni.

[littlefirework]

Originally posted by BFCA
the shadow's fine, but it looks tlike the normal picture doesnt quite go with thwe background, which porbably cant be helped anyway.

The clown is sharper and more saturated than the background. A touch of blur and a wash of blue blends him in bit more. A quick attempt...

edit: that's a bit overdone, but you get the idea anyway ;)

[wyrd_fish]

i did try to wash him out a bit, by reducing the contrast, just not enough