Snail Shadow

In this tutorial I learned how to make a realistic shadow. First I chose an image, in my case a snail, then I selected it by using the magnetic marquee tool. After that I put it in the background of my choice, wood chips, by dragging and dropping. In order to make the shadow I followed the tutorial and made a layer copy. Then I used the transform tool and stretched it to take the form of a shadow. I made it a black to white translucent gradient to make it look like a shadow but since that didn't correspond with the background so I used the eyedropper tool to replace the white with a tannish color. Since the shadow didn't quite mach up with my snail I used the puppet warp to get it connected to my snail. Finally I used the burn tool to blend the background and snail together while adding a shadow as well.