i mean, if you personally had designed a brochure containing images with drop shadows behind some of them in .ai, how would you do it? I guess I'm not totally sure what things i should link and what things i should just embed. Thanks!

    What happened is this: my client emailed me the image as a jpg. I downloaded it, then right clicked "open with" - photoshop. It opened in photoshop. Then I saved it as a tif. (maybe i didn't need to do this). Then still in psd i went to image size - and made the image 6x4 inches (the image is supposed to be printed 3x2 inches on the brochure) . Then I made it 300 dpi resolution and kept the resampling box checked. Then I went to layer styles; drop shadow; and used the drop shadow  menu to get it the size and placement and opacity i desired .It's just a  plain rectangular drop shadow which is a little offset behind the plain  rectangular photo. I did check the box where the image would drop out  the drop shadow (or whatever it said:). The drop shadow is on the same layer as the image. Then behind all of it is a larger rectangle of the grey and white boxes, which show thru thru the drop shadow in psd. I'm assuming this is simply the artboard. Then i named it and saved it into a "links" folder which i plan to include in the folder containing the illy brochure file.

    Since the psd image is 6x4 inches, will it reset to 3x2 when printed to match the placed image size? Or should I size the psd image exactly like the illy placed image? Is the drop shadow in this case a blend like you were describing earlier?

    Did i do anything wrong in the process which will make the brochure print incorrectly, or am i being too confusing for you to know ? ))

    I'm so nervous about how it all translates from one to the other. Thanks in advance!