photoshop tutorial

Creating a shadow tutorial
Creating a giant elephant, but I am not interested in giant elephants, especially if they start walking funny. My first choice was to go back to my golden egg since the directional lighting was sharp. For my environment, a cave in India. I cheated on my first egg by grabbing a portion on it that seemed to show the proper directional lighting, copied onto a new layer, and placed it in the environment. I grabbed a shadow with the elliptical tool from some previous shadow, applied some blur and edge softening, fit it to the space, and voila.

Okay too easy, even though I easily have been putting time into this thing. How about adding the motorcycle guys on cell phones zooming through their sacred space. White shirts with shadows... So off to select them, reduce saturation so that they look more real in the cave, and place them in.

Now to play with shadows... Make a duplicate layer of motorcycle guys and fill it in, distort it in length and orientation so it follows the light path, opacity, blur, edges.

Finally the shadow for the clothing...another duplicate layer where the copy stays behind with one layer the darker adding more blue for shadow, one layer the brighter, on top. Tweaking for the fill of the shadow colors, then erasing. Also noticed the motorcycle shadow layer could be referred to for direction of darkness on the shirts.

How much time for all this...don't know where the day went but I do recommend a break for popcorn, chewing helps clear the mind.