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Realistic Shadows |
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| Create a new image. There isn't much to learn concerning drop shadows that you couldn't learn by simple observation. Most people though do not observe as closely as they think they do, hence the preponderance of really bad drop shadow effects. Create a new image, any size that's easy to work with, any background color you like. |
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Shadowing thin flat objects. We will start with a flat object, say a piece of paper on top of another piece of paper. Layers-> New Raster Layer. Click on the  Selection tool. Drag out a rectangular selection well inside the boundaries of your image. Click on the  Flood Fill tool and fill the selection with any color. Click on the background layer. Layers-> New Raster Layer, this is where the drop shadow will go. Selections-> Hide Marquee so that you can see the shadow we will apply unhindered. Effects-> 3D Effects-> Drop Shadow.The Offsets in this dialog control where the shadow falls. All shadows on your layout need to fall in the same direction. It is customary for shadows to be shown as falling to the right of an object, if you are using premade elements in your layout, the chances are that any contouring that was done to the element is assuming a light source from the top left causing any shadows to fall to the right. This means that your Offsets need both be a positive value. Because paper is a very thin object it will not cast much of a shadow, so the Offsets need to be a low number. Here, I've set the offsets both to 1. The Blur setting controls how soft the shadow is. The greater the thickness of the object or its distance from the background, the blurrier the shadow should be. The paper in this example is a thin object very close to the background. It will need a fairly sharp shadow. Here I've set the Blur to 3. The Opacity setting controls how opaque the shadow is. We will always leave this at 100% because we are always going to put shadows on their own layer. You then control the opacity of the shadow by using the Opacity slider in the layer control palette. This will save you a lot of time by not having to redo shadows that end up being the wrong opacity. The color swatch allows you to choose the color for your drop shadow. As long as your shadow is going to be not completely opaque, you can leave this as black. If you find yourself with circumstances where the shadow will be left at 100% opacity, the color should be a very dark version of the background color rather than black. Set the shadow with Offsets of 1, Blur of 3, Opacity 100% and swatch color black. Hit the  Proof button to preview the shadow on the image. You can see that this is far too dark for my choice of background paper. I will go to the layer control palette and reduce the opacity of the drop shadow layer to 30%. |
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Add a highlight. Besides casting a shadow. a light source will also cause highlights to occur on an object. Highlights always fall opposite shadows. We can create this effect by using the Cutout filter. In the layer control palette, click on the top layer in the layer stack, Layers-> New Raster Layer. Effects-> 3D Effects-> Cutout. You can see that this filter is very similar to the Drop Shadow filter. The Drop Shadow filter causes paint to be drawn outside the selection. The Cutout filter causes paint to be drawn inside the selection. The settings in the filter work the same as in the Drop Shadow filter except that the Offsets go the other direction, positive offsets will put the cutout on the top left of the selection. Again, because we have a flat object, the cutout should be thin with not much blur. I will use the same settings as I did for the drop shadow, this time the swatch color needs to be white or a very light tint of the object color. Again, we adjust the opacity of this layer using the slider in the layer control palette. Here, I've reduced the opacity to 40%. |
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Shadowing a thick object. You will need an object with thickness to it to follow along. If you don't have anything handy on your hard drive, you can download the gold round alpha sample from neocognition. Create a new image, copy and paste the object into the new image as a new layer. Click on the image containing the object, Edit-> Copy. Click on the new image, Edit-> Paste as New Layer. You do not need to create a selection for this or a new layer, PSP is going to do it for us. Effects-> 3D Effects-> Drop Shadow. The last setting that you used, 1, 1, 100, 3 are still there, hit the Proof button to see that this shadow is inappropriately thin and sharp for the object. This object is obviously metal and much thicker than a piece of paper. The shadow for it will need to be wider and blurrier. Experiment with the settings in the dialog. Adjust the Opacity field so that you can get a realistic idea of the shadowing. I will set both Offsets for this object at 4 and the Blur to 7. I used the Opacity slider to preview my shadow, now however, I will turn it back up to 100%. Check mark the Shadow on new layer box and hit okay. Look in the layer control palette and you will see that there is now a new layer called "Raster 1 Shadow 1". Decrease the opacity of this layer to make the shadow realistic. Here I've decreased it to 50%. (Another advantage to using the Shadow on new layer feature is that the shadow will move with the object when you use the Mover tool on it). If you look closely at the metal alpha, you can see that it was pre-designed with a highlight on it. If you were to need to add a highlight to a premade object, you would take a selection from the object itself by doing Selections-> Select All, Selections-> Float, Selections-> Defloat. You can then apply a cutout as we did before. |
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Shadowing translucent objects. Translucent objects such as glass or acrylic should always have a drop shadow that is a darker shade of the object, not black. Look at the images to the left, the top object has a black drop shadow, the bottom one has a drop shadow that is a dark pink. Both use the same offset, blur and opacity settings. You can sample colors from your image directly from the Drop Shadow dialog, when the dialog opens, move your cursor over to your image to sample from it. Click on the color swatch to bring the Material palette up, drag the lightness slider down until you have a dark version of your color. |
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