Angie and Dalis, you just described my shadowing style exactly. Lorry, thank you so much for your generosity!! I will play with your action in my next layout.
I definitely do a lot of shadow edits. I edit my personal shadows per element or paper then warp/ blur the shadows. My 3: papers leaves tabs/journal strips
Only lately have I started to use "my own" shadows in photoshop, I still find it cumbersome and time consuming, so and extra thank you to Lorry for sharing ! But I do like to shadow paper and elements that are supposed to be in the foreground . In CraftArtist it is a much easier process, you get a special mini toolbar for tweaking your shadows, and it makes the whole thing easier, and more fun too. sorry cant link without showing the page.
I'm too lazy to tweak shadows. Plus I don't think I have a good eye for that kind of detail. I can see the difference on pages by others, but I can't tell if I'm going too far or not. I'm happy with being lazy and using styles!
question- do you change how you shadow for darker papers? I have the hardest time shadowing stuff when it's on top of a dark paper.
For darker paper/elements, I do a linear burn in a dark color (dark black or dark brown) and only slightly blur so a darker edge is visible. For lighter elements/paper, I often do an orange/brown shadow on a page that has lots of warm tones.
I'm a tweaker ( not in the HBO sense ). I mostly use my own styles and I add basic shadows as I go, which is different than when I first started scrapping when I saved it all for the end. I find that if I add as I go I get a better sense of the page coming together, and then I tweak at the end. ( multiple layers, warping, brushing etc ) I usually don't go crazy if I want to mimic paper (no floaters) I just try to make sure that things aren't too perfect.
I love shadows and sometimes I'll have a page where I mess with every shadow and some pages I just use my shadow presets and that's it.... most of the time it's somewhere in between. The most wonderful thing that I "found" recently is the "scale effect" option! It's always been there but I guess I didn't actually "see" it until last week lol! So I might put the same "paper shadow" on all my papers and then play around with the "scale" which is great because it retains the same effects for everything but I can adjust for paper size and distance from background for example! oh, and my top 3 things to mess with shadows on are papers/tags, strings (and other string like elements) and then flowers.
You all have inspired me to try the warp tool a little bit. I've generally spent some time shadowing the more dimensional items on my pages but hadn't really used that tool. I'm liking how they are turning out.