FOR A FINAL TOUCH, we need to give the Yellow stripe or "bar" a presence of its own, so we'll need a shadow for that as well.
Duplicate the Yellow stripe by selecting its layer, and using Command/J (Control/J)
Switch to the layer for the Yellow stripe on the bottom,
Select it (racing ants) and fill the stripe with black just as we did the original object before. (Option/Delete, or Alt/Delete with the object selected.)
Drop the Selection (Cmd/D, or Cntrl/D)
Choose : Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur and
set the blur to about half the amount you did before.
Tap V (for the move tool) and
using the arrow keys, move the shadow for the Yellow stripe down several pixels, then set its opacity to reflect yet another layer of shadow. Here we used about 50%.
Now you see three layers of surfaces in space. Each gets progressively lighter as it recedes away from the white foreground object.
To drive this message home, let's introduce yet another surface. One that is in the very close foreground.
I won't walk you through each step in this stage because you've already been through the progression twice. You should know it by now.
In this final scene, the red bar is now above the white object, and you'll notice that its shadow falling on the gray background is far removed to provide the illustion that it is floating a great distance off the background.
I have provided the actual layered Photoshop file for download so you can check all the layers and values yourself.
In reference to the tutorial about merging photos, only the lower portion of the boy's shadow was needed against the stone sign. So, to illustrate that, we'll need to kill half of our shadows above.
Select the White object (the Boy?) Cmd/click or Cntrl/click to select it.
(racing ants confirm selection)
* Click the shadow layer, and Delete to remove unwanted shadow portions.
* Turn off the view of the white object (Click the "eye" icon)
* Remove unwanted shadow areas
Now, you see by using this method, you can retain or remove any portion of the shadows that you don't want or need.
Always remember that shadows cast are determined by the surface they're cast upon, the distance from the object casting the shadow, and the nature of the surface or plane they hit. To get realistic shadows, you'll need to consider all of these aspects.
End
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from the Editor:
I was delighted that day back in 1989 when Peggy Killburn called to ask if I could handle one more speaker in my "Great Graphics Tips & Tricks" session scheduled for the 1990 Macworld Expo. "Yes" was my response to her request to add Russell Brown to my panel. After all, we loved Adobe's young "Illustrator" program, and were quite anxious to try out their upcoming new product called "Photoshop." After seeing his demo, I was convinced Photoshop would be big. So the next month we added "Photoshop Tips & Tricks" to our regular DTG Magazine uploads to Compuserve, GEnie and AOL. The rest is history.
I only regret that I didn't trademark the name.
Editor / Publisher: Photoshop Tips & Tricks, DTG Magazine.