http://www.clubscrapcommunity.com/main-community/swaps/details/355-big-deal-digital-page-swap-feb-2014-cathyjgray
This is a tremendous swap which Cathy Gray hosts every month.
Now on to what I have decided to do for this month. Custom drop shadows can be challenging so I thought I would show you quickly how to do one.
First open up a new document with a transparent background and bring in the image you want to give the special shadow to. In this case I am using a charm from Big Deal.
Next duplicate the layer with the charm and rename it shadow. Also make a layer with a white fill. Rearrange your layers so that you have the white fill at the bottom and the shadow layer in the middle of the three layers you have in your layers palette.
Set the foreground color to black and fill the copy of the image layer by pressing ctrl, shift and delete all together. Go to filters>blur>gaussian blur and set the blur between three to five.
Make sure that the shadow layer is active and hit ctrl T. That should bring up a bounding box with handles on it.
Now you can start manipulating your custom shadow. By pressing ctrl and picking up one of the little handles you can move the shadow around.
Here you can see the shadow really exaggerated. I think this may actually work for what I have in mind.
At this point the shadow should be on its own layer and you can probably see that I have changed the opacity of the shadow a bit. Now make a copy of the shadow layer and place it beneath the shadow layer.
Activate the copy of the shadow layer and set the opacity low so you can see the shadow going from black to grey to light grey etc. Resize the copy of the shadow layer to make it just a tiny bit bigger than the shadow layer.
You can then merge all visible layers and save for use. Here is something I made with mine!
I do hope you have enjoyed this simple tutorial - your next stop on the hop is:
