Help! Drop shadows on drugs...
 

Why do my posted LO's look like my drop shadows are psycho?
Like this and this

I know it has something to do with the way I save (in PSE5) because my original LO doesn't look like that - until I do 'save for web'

I always save my .psd first, then save a .jpg, then resize by going to Image-Resize-Image Size and changing it to 600x600, then save that using file - save for web

What am I doing wrong???? :hairpull:

I don't see anything wrong with your drop shadows... The only thing I do different than you is save for web as a jpeg and change the size there; from 100% to 22% (which makes it 792 X 792). I don't resize the image after saving it as a jpeg, in other words.

But it looked good to me, in fact those pages are awesome! Maybe my drop shadows are psycho too and I never even realized it... But, I really don't think yours are.

I'm gonna be absolutely no real help here at all probably, 'cause I'm a PSP girl, but I'll give it a whirl. Can you change blending modes on drop shadows in PSE. If you can that might be it. When I have something that's kind of transparent and darkly colored and use the soft light blending mode, it looks great until I save for the web and then it looks like someone threw up on my page (not that your pages look like that, but I usually use the soft light blend on my overlays, so it's usually a whole bunch of dark colored stuff that looks bad). In fact, I did this on my ST 4 layout. I used Theresa's black floral paper as an edge overlay and with the soft light, it looked almost glittery, but when I saved for the web, it looked awful. Luckily, I realized what it was and just changed my blending to overlay and for some reason that doesn't do it. I don't know if that is even the least bit helpful, but I figued I'd toss my useless knowledge in....:)

I too do what Amy talks about in PSE. I do Save For Web > and then on the next screen I change the dimensions from 3600x3600 to something like 800x800.

But thanks Daphne for the PSP trick :)

I'll add and say that I only use Save As JPG (different then Save For Web) in PSE when I want to print the layout through our printing service.

I don't know about PSE, but PS has an option when you resize to scale the styles. If the box isn't checked, it leaves the same big shadow and doesn't shrink it down with the image. Maybe there is something like that going on. :)

Erin, were you able to figure this out?? I'm having the same problem, and it's driving me crazy!

I think so. I've been saving the .psd first, then doing save for web and resizing there. Seems to be working so far :)

I'm not sure I understand quite right what you are doing. But, with gimp, saving as jpg, then rescaling the file is not the right thing to do: if the jpg file is not closed, it still has all the layers...
So, with my .xcf open (that's the gimp format, similar to psd), I select "save a copy" (a jpg one, of course), then open the .jpg, with one layer only, and rescale that one.
This requires more mouse-clicks, but is faster, since the computer only needs to rescale one layer...

I had tried doing the save for web, but I always get an error saying something like the file is too big and may cause problems... This is PSE 2.0.

I just tried the .jpg save and then resizing it, and it worked! Thanks a lot for the help!