I have a couple of designer sets of shadows that I really like but am having an odd issue lately. (but then again aren't all issues with our scrapping softwares odd...) Say I have element A and use an bought shadow on it. Fine and good enough for me. Then I go and use the same shadow on element B but want to change the direction of the shadow. So I go into the little fx and ...say reverse it from 90° south to 90°north i.e. with the shadow on the bottom to a shadow on the top. What is happening is that my original shadow is changing too, as if they are connected. Huh?? Today when this happened, I finally turned PSE off and turned my computer off too then tried again. I finally just had to use two distinctly different shadows. Anyone else have this issue??
I think this is a problem with PSE. It always changes the shadows below to the same direction. The only way around it, that I know of, is to separate out the shadow. I use Mommyish's shadows and action which work wonderfully together - https://the-lilypad.com/store/stylin-263.html
Maureen - I don't have PSE 2019 installed but I'm guessing it has something to do with global lighting. So if you change the lighting angle for one shadow, is it changing the actual shadow direction on the other elements or is it just changing the lighting angle value to the most recent value even though the shadow on the other elements isn't changing? If it's only changing the lighting angle value but not actually changing the direction on the layout, then that's a known bug in PSE for many, many versions. But if it's actually changing the shadow direction on other elements on your layout without you going into the fx, then it's global lighting causing that. Think of global light as a lamp in a room. If you move the lamp, then direction of the shadows for everything in the room moves too. So when you changed the direction of the shadow (lighting angle) for the one element, PSE 2019 may be thinking you're moving the lighting angle for everything on the layout.
Or if you don't do custom shadows you could just simplify the layer with the element and it's shadow before you make shadow changes on another layer.
Maureen -- Here's the deal, PSE is resetting the angle every time, you just happened to notice it since you went into one to check the angle. Cheryl of @gonewiththewind was looking into the problem and I think it is a known bug. The settings reset to 90 straight up, but the actual angle of the shadow should stay the same. Cheryl might be able to tell you more. That said, it is also resetting the angle of rotation too. So if I rotate something to the right +10 degrees, and then go to rotate it again, it shows zero. Not the 10 degrees already rotated. So it is like it has a relative angle instead of an absolute angle. Arggh.
@cookingmylife It is a bug, and the person that I spoke to works with Adobe on software development. She told me they would work to have this fixed for the 2020 release. What she said was this: The shadow style dialog appears to be stuck at whatever was the last manual input despite what style is actually applied. It was also discovered that when you add more than one style (say an outline and a shadow), it simplifies the layer. You have to undo to reverse the layer simplification. She was going to be testing that and reporting that bug as well. Sorry to have to tell you that, but at least you know that the shadow style dialog is incorrect, but the way the shadows look should be correct. Often I will open the shadow styles settings by double clicking on the fx button on the layer style, and rather than input anything into the dialog box, I'll move over to the embellishment or paper and move the shadow that way. That might work better than relying on the faulty dialog box.
