How to Add a Shadow Effect in Adobe Photoshop CS3

So the last thing I am going to do with my Features area is add a Shadow effect to the bottom edge of this area. So in order to do this, I am going to select my Features group again, twirl that down, and I am going to click on the New Layer icon to create a new layer. We will actually rename it to features_shadow. Press Enter to accept that name, and we will press M for the Marquee Tool. Let me get rid of the Character Panel here. We will make a small selection right underneath the Features area, and we want to apply that Drop Shadow, so I am going to do that using the Gradient Tool, and let's just make sure that we have the default black and white colors selected.

So I am going to press the D key to select the default colors, and that looks about right. We have got the right Gradient type selected here, and we will go ahead and draw a small, small line, holding our Shift key down to apply that Gradient.

We can just turn down the Opacity to 50%, and that gives us the right effect that I was looking for.

We will press Ctrl+D to get rid of the selection. Perfect! So now we are done with this part of our layout, and we will be using it again in another lesson when we import this Photoshop file into Flash.

So before we go any further, we are going to go ahead and save this file. So I will go up to my File Menu and select Save. You can note the keyboard shortcut, which is Ctrl+S or Command+S on the Mac. We will save using the same filename that we have there, we will click Save.

This brings up the Photoshop Format options dialog box, which basically just wants us to confirm that we want to maximize our files compatibility with previous versions of Photoshop. So we will click OK, and we are all set.


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