© 1996 by Matt Giwer, 1/29 Liked it, huh?       Oh, you hated it but are curious. Fine with me. Lets start with the simpler one first. If you have not done so go back to the red, green and yellow one and click on it. You will see a much simpler blue on white with a black shadow. This is all based on Photoshop 2.5.
      First make two windows of the same size. In one of them write something. Select only the text (or whatever is to have a shadow. It works for images also.) Copy that to the other window.
      Color the one in the second window black. Select|none and apply a little guassian blur 2.0 is enough. Use the rectangular selection tool to select the area containing the text.
      Now go to Image|Distort and choose perspective. Grab a top dot and move it outwards and downwards so that it is shorter in height and wider at the top. Save that.
      Now go back to the first and do whatever you like with the text NEVER DEselecting it. I ran it through a Kai texture explorer. When finished, copy it and paste it into the other image. Move it around until it looks right and you are done.
      The more complicated one is the same basic technique. First I imagined the text being illuminated with a green light over my right shoulder and a red light over my left shoulder. When I mix red and green in a computer I get yellow.
      Think it through and you will see that where the red is casting a shadow it will be illuminated green and vice versa. So, I need text, a yellow background and a red and a green shadow. So I open four identical windows.
      Color them all yellow to minimize any aliasing problem. Copy the text to two of the screens. Color one red and the other green. Select each with a rectangle and choose the distort tool, not perspective, the arbitrary one.
      For red, take the top right button and move it a good way to the right and down about half. Take the top left button and move it down the same amount and a little bit to the right. Repeat for the green image save move the buttons to the left. Gaussian blur both; 4.0 was used here.
      Now the fun part. Select and copy the entire green window and copy it to the solid yellow window. (Right, you didn't need the yellow screen but it is easier to explain this way.) Next select and copy the entire red screen and hold down the ALT key when you paste into the yellow and green screen. (I do not know what to press on a MAC.)
      With the alt key down the composite controls are usable. With those adjust the screen until you see both shadows. And where they overlap should look black as there would be no light reaching those places.
      At this step you add the texture you want for the background and shadows as they will all have the same texture. (Not quite true but then I haven't worked that out yet. You see the green should come from the bottom left and the red from the bottom right given this scheme.)
      Now go back to your original text which you have not deselected. Set the foreground color green and the background red and make a linear gradient from left to right across the text. Now do whatever texturing or whatever you want at this point. What I chose was a bit too close to the one for the shadow image. Next time I will do better.
      Finally, copy the text and paste it into the shadow image, move it until it is as high as looks right and you are done. It sounds harder than it is. Once you have done it a few times the method becomes intuitive.
      The background for the entire page comes from simply texturing a small block with the same texture as the image with the shadows.
      What should come from all this is to always consider using multiple copies of images and overlaying them for complex constructed images. It offers a lot more control. It solves the problem of working on different parts of an image after they have become too complex for the selection tool to work.