that seems to work fine, until I try the recessed look by applying drop shadows or bevels at various settings to the shape layer.
Rather than using canned effects, which may not look so good at the top or bottom boundaries of layers, just use a soft-edged brush to paint fake shadows.
Make a layer with your tiling image in place.
Put a white-filled layer beneath it.
Delete the middle 960 pixels of the tiling image.
Add a layer between the existing two.
Use a soft brush to paint a single vertical stroke beneath both ‘edges’ of the visible white area, in the new empty layer and beneath the tiling image layer.
Using a very simple tileable gradient image and working in Photoshop Elements 8 these steps will produce something like this: http://www.geekhell.com/example.gif
Keith, thank you for this. This is precisely what I’m after. Now I can putz around in Photoshop Elements a bit more to get closer to what I really want. (Sorry I didn’t notice this earlier. The thread sort of traveled.)
You know, the power of Freeway is that it makes great designs look so darned easy. But once a few layers for a specific technique get peeled away, they’re inevitably just a little tougher than they appear at first blush. In this case, it calls on Photoshop skills that, as with Freeway, I know just enough about to get totally caught up, but not enough to do things quickly or efficiently. And then if I don’t have occasion to do them often, I tend to forget and have to start all over.
