Step 14: Select The Move Tool

We've drawn our first window blind shadow, even though at the moment it looks like nothing more than a black rectangle. Before we do anything fancy with it, let's use this first rectangle to create the rest of our shadows. First, select Photoshop's Move Tool from the Tools palette, or simply press V on your keyboard:

Step 15: Drag A Copy Of The Black Rectangle Below The Original

We're going to create a copy of this first rectangle and drag it below the original, and we can do both of these things at the same time. With the Move Tool selected, hold down your Alt (Win) / Option (Mac) key. You'll see your Move Tool cursor change into two arrows, one black and one white. This tells us we'll be creating a duplicate of the rectangle as we drag it. Hold down your Shift key as well which will force us to drag the rectangle straight down, preventing us from accidentally moving it sideways. Then simply drag down with your mouse and as you drag, you'll see that you're dragging out a duplicate of the black rectangle rather than dragging the original. Make sure you still have your selection active around the original rectangle before you begin dragging, since this will keep both rectangles on the same layer. Position the new rectangle below the original where you want the second shadow to appear:

Step 16: Continue Dragging Out The Rest Of The Shadows

Continue dragging out duplicates of the rectangle all the way down the photo until you have all of your shadows created, then press Ctrl+D (Win) / Command+D to deselect the selection. Your image should now look something like this:

If we look in our Layers palette, we can see that all of our rectangles are on the same layer, "Layer 1":

Step 17: Apply The "Gaussian Blur" Filter To The Rectangles

At the moment, our rectangles still look like basic rectangles. To make them look more like shadows, we need to soften their edges. For that, we'll use the Gaussian Blur filter once again. Go back up to the Filter menu at the top of the screen, choose Blur, and then choose Gaussian Blur. When the Gaussian Blur dialog box pops up, drag the Radius slider at the bottom towards the right to blur and soften the edges of the rectangles, just like we did a moment ago when we were preparing our displacement map image. I'm going to drag my Radius value to around 9 pixels. We can see in the preview area of the dialog box that this softens the edges nicely:

Click OK to exit out of the dialog box when you're done. Here's my image with the edges of the rectangles now much softer:

Step 18: Apply The "Displace" Filter

The edges of the rectangles now look better, but the shadows still don't look realistic. One of the reasons, besides the fact that they're completely blocking the photo underneath them from view, is that they're simply running horizontally across the photo. To give them a sense of realism, we need them to be bending around the woman's face, hands and hair. This is where we get to use the displacement map we created earlier.

With "Layer 1" selected in the Layers palette, go up to the Filter menu at the top of the screen once again, and this time choose Distort and then Displace:

This brings up the first of two dialog boxes for the Displace filter. This first one lets us decide how much of an impact the displacement map will have on the image, and we do this by entering values for the Horizontal Scale and Vertical Scale options. The higher the values, the further Photoshop will move the pixels. In our case, we don't need to move the pixels horizontally at all, so enter 0 for the Horizontal Scale option. We do need to move them vertically, so enter a value of around 20 for the Vertical Scale option. You may need to experiment with this value to see what works best with your image. Make sure that you have the Stretch To Fit and Repeat Edge Pixels options selected as well:

Click OK to accept your changes and exit out of this first dialog box. We'll choose our displacement map next.