Creative Tip: Opaque-to-Transparent Shadow Trick.

Saturday was Groundhog Day. In a national media event, Punxsutawney Phil saw his shadow, leading the groundhog to forecast six more weeks of winter. And speaking of shadows...

Have you ever found yourself with a Photoshop image that has an object's shadow on an opaque white background, when what you need is that same shadow on a transparent layer. Read the full version of this tip for a simple technique to accomplish just that!

Full Tip: Photoshop Opaque-to-Transparent Shadow Trick.

Source: This tip inspired by a great production question last week from Jim Mannino at Landreth Studios in Seattle, regarding a project for the in-house creative team at Philips Ultrasound in Bothell.

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Tech Tip: Create a Favicon for your Web site.

A favicon is an icon you can design for your website that shows up next to the URL when someone visits. Think of it as a tiny visual business card for your Web site. You can create one by visiting Genfavicon, a simple Web site who's only purpose is to generate favicons for you:

genfavicon.com

Note: Once you've created your favicon.ico file, you'll need to upload it to the root directory of your website and add bit code in the header of your html files (Here's a simple favicon tutorial).

Source: This tip comes directly from James Dempsey's new The Graphic Mac. For an old-school tip on how to export favicon.ico files directly from Photoshop, we covered this back in Tips #25 How to add a Favicon to your website.

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CreativeTechs QuickTips is a free weekly newsletter for creative professionals who use Macs. Each week we publish a fresh mix of left-brain and right-brain tips based on our real world experience supporting hundreds of creative teams in the greater Seattle area. For a complete archive of previous tips, visit www.creativetechs.com/tips

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