Antialiasing and Drop Shadows

Hi and HELP!

I'm very new to Photoshop (am ploughing my way through gazillions of online 'Help' tutorials and about to pull my hair out!) and am working with an older CS Version.

I have purchased several vector images. I want to know how to apply an antialias and a drop shadow to the edges of the image.

So far, I have taken the original image to Photo Editor and made the white background transparent (this is the only way I know how to do this).

But when I take the .gif file to photoshop - because the image is on a transparent rectangular background, I can only seem to antialias and drop shadow the edges of the rectangle! How do I 'get into' the actual image to play with it??!

I'll be forever indebted to anyone that may be able to help!

Many Thanks!

Cheers,
MissM

Hi Guys,

To create lots of effects in PS, try this technique.
1. In Illustrator, or Corel or similar, select you vector image and put a color into it. (eg Red)

2. If your vector file wont fill with color, it may be that a node is not joined to make an entire path.

3. In the drawing program, Illustrator or Corel, Select the image and Export as .eps.

4. Then go to PS and open a new file to the canvas size you want.

5. Go File | Place - Find your .eps file and place into the file. Handles will allow you move or resize or rotate the .eps file

6. Once you are happy with size or position, click on any tool on the Tool menu, this will prompt the file to be placed into your doc.

From here, you can create a shadow, outline, filter effect etc in Photoshop.
a) Double click the right side of the layer name in the Layers Bar. This will open a new window with lots of options. Choose Drop Shadow, adjust the angles, click on the color to change it and so on.
b) Another technique and better for commercial output is to Duplicate the layer, then lock the layer (transparency) then press Alt-Delete to fill the pixels with color. (Doing this method allows you to add blends, noise, photos eg to the layer and then turn it into a shadow with color.) This will fill the layer except the protected (locked) transparent pixels.
Then, unlock the layer. Go to Top Menu, Filter, Gaussian Blur. Adjust size, opacity etc.

7. Last step (optional) Right Click the layer, choose 'Rasterize' Layer. This will turn the layer into a true pixel format.

Another tip for using PS is to work in RGB or CMYK and at last stages change your mode to Indexed (gif). If your having trouble with color, most probably it is you may be in the wrong color mode. Top menu | Image | Mode >rgb,cmyk,indexed....

Hope it helps,
http://www.australiasigns.com.au