Photoshop Layer Styles – Creating Drop Shadows In Photoshop

Ever wondered how to create a drop shadow in Photoshop? In today’s video, I’m gonna show you how to add a drop shadow to text using the Layer Styles Drop Shadow dialog box. Then we’ll apply what we learned about layer styles and add a drop shadow to a subject coming up.

What Are Drop Shadows Used For?

So, a drop shadow is used to simulate 3D depth in a 2D image. So in this case that offset shadow here is what actually makes the text appear like it’s hovering over the background. So I’m gonna show you more examples of how a drop shadow can be used to indicate how big a light source is and where it’s coming from, also how far away an object is from its background. So to add drop shadows we’re going to do that from the Layer Styles panel and to get to the Layer Styles panel all you need to do is double-click and in this case, we’re double-clicking on a text layer.

The Layer Styles Drop Shadow Dialog Box

Double-click on the text layer and this is your Layer Style dialog. If you wanna add a new drop shadow, what you do is you come to the fx here and scroll down and then click on Drop Shadow, and now you have a drop shadow dialog box to work with. Make sure that once you add that new drop shadow that you highlight the drop shadow on the left-hand side so that you see the panel here with all the adjustments for the drop shadow. If you want to delete a drop shadow what you can do is highlight the one you want to delete then just click on this trash can right here so you’re deleting that effect. Notice in the layers panel for this text layer right below the text layer says effects and then it says drop shadow. So every time you add an effect to this text layer it’s gonna keep on adding the next effect, so you’re gonna see them all in a row.

Blend Mode

So the blend modes that they have here for the shadows typically you’re gonna be using the multiply or the linear burn. So those are the two that you’ll be using and most of the time its multiply. You can also change the color of the shadow if you want. By default, it comes up as black but you can click on the color picker, choose a color and say okay. Now you could see that my shadow is red but that’s another effect that you can have. I’m gonna change this back to black and by the way, if you’re just starting out with layer style working with the drop shadow dialog is probably really good for you because some of the settings are basic but you’re gonna get a good feel for working with the other effects that you can use in the layer styles just by working with the drop shadow first.

Opacity

So once you have your shadow visible and you’ve decided what color you want it, you can use the opacity slider to make your shadow visible or invisible. Here I’m taking the opacity all the way down to zero and bringing it all the way up to 100. But as you see me going back and forth, you can see the visibility of the shadow effect that is changing.

Angle

Okay, let’s talk about angle now. So, if I come over here to my text layer and I double-click on my effect name, in this case, drop shadow, double-click on it, we already know how to set the blend mode usually to multiply. We know how to set our shadow color. We know about the opacity, making it visible. Angle is to help you make that shadow change according to maybe the direction of light. As I’m changing this angle here you could see that the shadow is moving so I can simulate the direction of light using the angle. To use global light that parameter what it does is this angle here when you have other effects like bevel and emboss, those are some possibilities over here but it’ll retain that same angle for other effects that you might use with this particular text. So again, to recap, blend mode you can use linear burn or multiply. Let me go back to multiply and this, you could see a difference in the darkness of the shadow down here between multiply and linear burn. You can play with those to see which blend mode gives you a better effect. But so here we go, we have a black shadow. We know how to do that, we know how to change the opacity, we know how to change the angle and that’s for the direction of light.

Distance

But now distance is actually how far away that shadow is from your object. So as you could see, you can really bring out that shadow using distance, and this is another effect you can use to really enhance your text. Now let’s talk about the spread adjustment right here. We have everything set up here in our drop shadow. We know that we wanted the opacity 100%, black shadow. We have our angle here that we can change for our direction of light distance. Again, for the distance, the shadow is from the actual text.

Spread

So the spread slider is changing how gradually this fades out. So here it is how it’s fading on the edges. So this example, it’s a little bit different effect from the blend mode of linear burn and multiply. With multiply, you see that the shadows kind of grayed a little bit and with linear burn it’s more pronounced but shadow color is black, the opacity that we can change that and get our visibility. Light angle, distance.

Size

So the amount of space between the shadow and the text and now down here to size which actually makes the shadow bigger but it gets and does some softening. You see the more I go out and it softens the shadows. So, so far with just those settings, we’ve got a halfway decent drop shadow on this text.

Contour

So now we come to the contour setting here and what that does is allows you to change the fall off of the shadow in a non-linear fashion. So by choosing different curve profiles, you can get the shadow to fade out in different ways. So I’m just randomly clicking through these and you could see that the shadows just kind of taking on different effects. So they say that the only time this is really useful is when you’re trying to achieve a special glow or abstract effects. So each time I click on a different pattern you could see that the fall off of the shadow is non-linear or different. This anti-alias checkbox allows you to improve the quality of the shadow fall off and it’s recommended that that is always clicked on.

Noise

And in this example, I just wanted to show you about the noise slider and I made the shadow white just so you can see the effect of the noise. So, there is zero noise, there is 100% noise and it just gives the shadow a gritty appearance.

Drop Shadow model example

So now that we’ve added a drop shadow to a text, let’s add a drop shadow to this model right here. Remember I said that some of the uses for a drop shadow is you can actually show or simulate how far, like in this case, how far the model is from the background or the direction of light. So first, I’m going to cut this model out using the object select tool. And if you’re not familiar with the object select tool I have a video that I’m gonna put in the card above. So we’re going to select her and have Photoshop make the selection. I’m gonna zoom in here and actually get this little area right here. Gonna hold down the option and select that area, and I’m going to go into select and mask just briefly just maybe to smooth out the edge a bit. This does not have to be perfect because we’re dealing with a shadow and I’m going to just output this to a new layer. So there is my selection on a new layer. So now we can use our layer style. Let’s create a new drop shadow, so on multiply blend mode and let’s make a drop shadow here. I’m gonna make the angle come onto this other side, increase the opacity to 100, and I’m just pulling it out so that you can see. This is our drop shadow and we might want to soften it up a little bit with the size since it is a shadow. And it really doesn’t matter what the placement is right now, I’m just going to say okay. So now we need to separate the drop shadow effect from the cut out that we did. I right-click on the drop shadow and say Create Layer. And says some aspects of the effects cannot be reproduced with layers, that’s okay. Say OK. And here it is, the shadow is on its own layer. So now what we can do is change the way that shadow looks by doing a free transform, that is Command + T. Now I’ll hold the command key down and click on any of these points and drag down. You can see that I am changing the way the shadow looks if I put it under her feet. And just for demonstration purposes I’m just gonna say, I’m gonna click the commit transform right there. And I’m gonna use my opacity on that shadow layer to bring the opacity down. So, fairly easily, we have a drop shadow. Makes it looks like the light is coming from the left across her and it also makes it look like the background is closer than it is. So that’s a quick way to create a drop shadow using Layer Styles.