Photoshop Effects: Telling Stories With Shadows

Step 4: Make A Selection Around The Person Or Object

Just as we did with the original image when we drew a selection around the person in the photo, we need to draw another selection, this time around the person or object in the second image that we want to use for our shadow. So once again, use the selection tool of your choice to draw a selection around them (or it):

Step 5: Drag The Selection Into The Original Image

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Once you have your selection around the person or object, select the Move Tool from the Tools palette:

You can also press V on your keyboard to select it with the shortcut. Then, with both images open in their own separate document windows, simply click anywhere inside the selection and drag the image from the second photo into the original image's document window:

When you release your mouse button, you'll see the selection from the second image appearing in the original image:

You can close out of the second document window at this point, since we no longer need to have it open.

There's one thing I want to fix here before we continue. The boy in the photo is looking towards the right, but my super hero is looking towards the left. I need to flip the super hero around so that he's looking in the same general direction as the boy. To do that, I'll simply go up to the Edit menu at the top of the screen, choose Transform, and then choose Flip Horizontal:

When I do that, Photoshop flips the super hero around for me so that both he and the boy are looking towards the right:

Step 6: Fill The Shadow Image With Black

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Since we want to use the selected image we just dragged into the document as a shadow, we need to fill it with black. To do that, make sure you have black as your Foreground color by pressing the letter D on your keyboard, which resets your Foreground color to black and your Background color to white, as we can see in the two color swatches near the bottom of the Tools palette (the top left swatch is the Foreground color and the bottom right one is the Background color):

Then use the keyboard shortcut Shift+Alt+Backspace (Win) / Shift+Option+Delete to fill the person or object with black:

If we had simply pressed "Alt+Backspace" (Win) / "Option+Delete" (Mac), we would have filled the entire layer with black, but by adding the "Shift" key in there as well, we were able to fill only the person or object on the layer (the "contents" of the layer) with black. The rest of the layer remained untouched.