In this quick and easy tutorial I will show you how to create the ‘lifting corner’ effect that you can see in other areas of this website in 10 simple steps.
It’s really easy so even beginners can do it, and it adds a nice effect that’s a bit different from your standard Drop Shaddow or Outer Glow solutions to making images stand out.
1: Create a new document in the size that you want, remembering that the final area of the image will need to be about 10px from the bottom. For this example I will be using a document size of 250 x 250px.
2: Open your selected image, Select All (cmd + A / ctrl + A), select your new document, and paste it inside (cmd + v / ctrl + v).
3: Select Free Transform (cmd + t / ctrl + t) and scale the image from the corner down to the size of the document. All the while making sure you’re holding Shift to maintain the proportions. Hit Enter to complete the transformation.
If you want to just focus on one section of the image, then just scale until that section is central to the document.
4: Grab the Crop tool (C) and drag it around the edge of the document, making sure that it touches all 4 edges. Hit Enter to crop off any excess.
5: Go to the bottom edge of your image and chop off about 10px.
Now your image should look something like this:
6: Create a new layer and drag it below your image layer. Then cmd + click (Mac), or ctrl + click (PC) the image layer to make a selection around your image. Hit D to reset your foreground colour, then select the Paintbucket (G), and fill in the selection on the new bottom layer.
7: Deselect the layer (cmd + D / ctrl + D), and hide the top image layer by pressing the icon that looks like an eye. Select the layer with the black square on it in the layers pallette, and Free Transform again (cmd + T / ctrl + T). Right click on the black square and select Warp. Now, drag the bottom right node slightly to the left and down, and hit enter to complete the transformation.
8: Go to Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur, set the Radius to 3, and press OK. Now turn the top image layer back on and you should have something like this:
9: The final step is to reduce the opacity of the shadow layer to around 40%. Click the black square layer, and then enter 40% in the Opacity box at the top of the layers palette. Hit enter, and you’re done!
One final step that you might want to take, just to finish off and frame your image, is to add a Border and slight Inner Glow.
10: First double click on your image layer to open up the Layer Styles window, then select stroke and set the size to 3, the position to Inside, and choose the colour of your choice. Then select Inner Glow, set the Blend Mode to Multiply, the Opacity to around 25%, the colour to Black, and the Size to 10px. Phew!
Once you’ve finished you should have something that looks like this:
Please note that the values recommended in this post might not be perfect for everyone, so if you know your way around Photoshop please feel free to play around with the settings to suit your images perfectly.