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Adobe Photoshop CC - Essentials Training

Bending or curved shadow under an image in Photoshop

Daniel Walter Scott

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Hi there, this video is all about Bendy Shadows. Can you see underneath the image here, I'm turning it on and off. It's this kind of bent paper look. The actual image itself is actually perfectly square. It's just the shadow that you bend. It's a neat little trick you can do when you're presenting your work or uploading it to, say a web gallery to kind of give it a bit of depth. Learning takes us a couple of minutes, let's learn how to do it now in Photoshop. 
To put the bendy shadow underneath, let's go to 'File', 'Open'. In your 'Exercise Files', under 'Shadows', there's one called 'Curved Shadow.jpeg'. Open that one up. Now this is just a flattened JPEG of something we made earlier in the course. Basically we have all the tools and techniques already for this one to work. We just need to combine them in a special way. First thing we need to do is generate a little bit more of a white background. So what we're going to do is we're going to grab our 'Crop Tool'. It's this one here, fifth tool down. It's going to make sure Content Aware is off because I don't want to actually extend the background, I want a bit of a white background. 
What we can do, in the top right, just click, hold, and drag. Click, hold, and drag down the bottom left here. Just giving myself a little bit of extra space. Drag it so it's in the middle. Hit 'Return' on my keyboard. Now what I'd like to do is I'd like to fill the background with white. So I'm going to make a new layer, I'm going to put it at the bottom. I should call it 'Background'. Not going to lie to you, I wouldn't, but you should. I'm going to go to 'Edit', and I'm going to go to 'Fill'. 
Now I'm going to say, fill with white. Click 'OK'. It's got a white background now. So with 'Layer 0' selected, I'm going to add my 'Drop Shadow'. Just like we did in the previous tutorial. There's only a slight change in this one. I've got a Drop Shadow, it depends on how much of a bendy shadow. One thing that you might do to save yourself some time is get the angle to be straight up and down. It's at 90, it's really hard to drag to 90. If you hold down 'Shift' while you're dragging it though it does lock it into like 5° increments, or just type it in, that's heaps easier. I'm happy with mine at 31 and 24. 
That was just what was left over from the last tutorial. You can mess about with yours. Let's click 'OK'. The magic happens here, you can right click the 'Drop Shadow' and say 'Create Layer'. Warning; you'll click that 'Don't show again'. I'm a trainer so I need to keep all stuff on. It's annoying, but it needs to be there every time I teach somebody that's new. And it's only annoying for me. 
So with the layer selected, the Drop Shadow selected, make sure you've got this one selected. Instead of going to 'Edit', 'Transform; we used 'Distort', we're going to use 'Warp'. Remember, Warp's more like fabric. Distort's more like playing with angles, Warp's more like turning it into fabric. What we're going to do is, these two little dots here are going to control the bend. So I'm kind of showing you what they do. I'm going to undo that, I want them back to the bottom. And I'm just going to drag this one up to about there. The same with this one. It really depends on how much of a bend you want at the bottom, so I want mine just a little bit more. 
It will depend on where you started with your Drop Shadow as well. When you're all finished, click 'return' on your keyboard and there's that kind of like-- makes the image look like it's sitting on the ground. It looks like it's a little bit more bent. You might lower the opacity of this layer here just to kind of knock it back a little bit depending on what you want. I'm happy with it, it's a cool effect. 
It's really quite nice when you're uploading these things to say a web gallery and you want to kind of make your images stand out when you're presenting them. We'll do a full section, like a full category on presenting work in the advanced Photoshop course. So you want to go into like full mock-ups, we'll do that in the advanced one but for now it is Bendy Shadows. I love it. All right, I will see you in the next video.