Photoshop tutorial: making a realistic shadow
1. For this demo, open the landscape and person photographs in Adobe Photoshop.
2. Retouch or clone any sections that may need it, in order to make it look more realistic. For example, in this sample photo, her arm was cloned to hide the post, and her hair was cloned to make it look like it was dangling.
3. Select the object or person and paste it into your landscape photo. You may also drag the entire image onto the landscape photo, select the person, and then use refine edge in your mask palette to clean it up.
4. If your selection becomes deselected, you can reselect it by clicking on the layer icon while holding ctrl on your keyboard. If you have a layer mask, make sure to click on it, too.
5. Make a new layer and go to your paint bucket tool and fill the selected area with black or go to Edit>Fill>Black.
6. Move this layer under your original object layer.
7. Move the black shadow under your object to a good position and change the layer’s opacity.
8. Now go to Filter > Blur > Gaussian blur on your black shadow layer. Select the best number to make your shadow look realistic based on the lighting in the other photo.
Journal Assignment:
Create a “levitation” photo or use this shadow technique in another way to create a photo with a surreal quality, which may be obvious or more subtle. For example, perhaps use an image from another object to cast a shadow that is different from the actual object. See the portrait of duality shown below as an example.
Portraits of Duality—Two sides of 1 person
Your challenge is to show 2 different aspects of one person (either yourself or someone else). You may show the fancy you and the one that does the laundry, or mom the 'enforcer' and mom the 'playmate' or as Marian does in her awesome portrait: "sweet little angel" shows 2 very different personality traits in one person.