dinner out

Bobbie I don't know how useful my thoughts will be.Someone more expert than myself will be along soon.All I can say is how I would approach it.

First,where is the source of light coming from eg 120 or from another direction.The smaller photo is smaller and lighter than the mounted one so a smaller,less dense shadow.Increase for the mounted one.The tab would cast a bigger shadow as it is higher from the background than anything else.The large photo if it was glued to the mount wouldn't cast a shadow.

I would use my eye dropper to pick a green from the backround and then play with varying degrees of that to create my shadows.

Now if I am totally wrong about that,someone will soon be here to put me right.So thankyou Bobbie,I will have learnt something too which will help my scrapping

The layout,by the way, is shaping up well.Looks a great place to eat

I agree with Floss for the shadows and the size of it for the different photos. As for the direction to use, there is a light source coming from the upper left on the tab. I would use this same direction for all the shadows. So once you have changed the direction on one shadow, it applies on the whole LO. Hope I am right too.

Love that green color and texture of your paper ... definitely a nice place to eat. You look beautiful and happy in your blue dress!

thanks for all your help...i will look closely at it and see what shadows go where... also if you check global light does that mean that they will all go the same way???

 

do you think the lo looks too sparse...and needs more or is it ok??/ any suggestions???

 

i have to get up from the computer and go for a walk and then will be back...to work on the helpful things you have both added.... i still find the shadows a challenge and if done right they really make a lo i noticed.

I like what you have done and agree on the suggestions. However I noticed you only added drop shadows on the left and bottom sides. When I do my drop shadows I add it all around the layout and doing that in PSP (not sure of PSE) you would do like a 2 for the left and bottom and then a -2 for the top and right side. Also we had a pussy willow freebie recently and I think that added along the right side of the layout as an overlay behind the photos will help draw attention to the pussy willows in the main photo.

it looks like you are off to a good start. you might want to add a SMALL drop shadow to your text. (it might be there and is just hard to see at this small of a size). if i have doubts about the size of the shadow, i always view the LO at 100% as that shows what it will look like when its printed.

sometimes it helps to consider real life when doing digital. I have taken a real printed out picture, and put it on a piece of white paper and put it on my kitchen table under the light. When I look at it, there will be "real" shadows where they actually would be. In digital we are usually trying to be as realistic as possible so that should give you kind of guideline as to what you would actually see. If you had 4 pictures on the same paper with the same light over them or sun coming in a window, the variance would be small between where the shadows hit. If possible move the light around so that it it coming from the same direction as the light in the photo.

 

Maybe that's hokey, but its another way to try to see how real shadows look and duplicate them. If you look at the lifted pictures templates, the designer puts a shadow under them because they look like they are lifted up off the paper.

 

Just my thoughts.