Forum: Photoshop


Subject: Shadow effects

runeseeker opened this issue on Jul 03, 2001 ยท 3 posts


runeseeker posted Tue, 03 July 2001 at 5:53 AM

I'm hoping someone can help me out with this ...is there a way that I can get a drop shadow to cast on the ground (ya know as a shadow should!) The drop shadow seems to be bound to the image it is cast from so I cannot rotate it or put it on it's own layer, I can only seem to move the shadow around the image to cast on a wall, but not on the ground. Thanks! - John

DigitalDream#3 posted Tue, 03 July 2001 at 8:48 PM

What app is the image done with? If it's done with a 3D one, just put a light source the way you want the shadow to fall. If this is post work in PS, you need to do some fancy cloning/brushwork. Clone out the original shadow, do a cut and paste/fill of the figure like a standard drop shadow, and rotate your perspective around with the transform tool. Should work.


dlm posted Tue, 03 July 2001 at 11:12 PM

I assume your doing post production in Photoshop & have the figure on a seperate layer.If that is the case you can create your own drop shadow effect on another layer. Drag the layer with the figure (as long as thats all thats on that layer)into duplicate layer at the bottom of the Layers pallette. Select the old (i.e.lower)of the two figure layers and go to Image-adjust-levels.Drag the black(left hand)triangle all the way to the right and you should have a black figure shape.Gaussian Blur it by about 10 and reduce the Layer opacity to the desired level.Say 50% or whatever. You can now slide the shadow to where it is required and use any of the tools,such as distort,perspective,etc to alter it as you wish,without altering the original figure. You can also use Layer effects,such as soft light to get different shadow effects or select & fill the black with other colours,such as blue for snow shadows.