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Creating Drop Shadows

As soon as you start looking for drop shadows, you'll find them everywhere: in magazines, television ads, Web sites, and in every other form of media you can imagine. Everyone is discovering that as soon as you put a shadow behind some text or an image, it takes on added dimension that can really make it pop forward into view. It's a nice and easy special effect for giving something more visual weight and making people pay attention. Drop shadows are a layer style rather than a filter, so you can apply them before or after you rasterize the type.

The following are some tips for effectively using drop shadows:

• Don't use them all over the place! If you use too many shadows, everything pops forward equally, and you lose the benefit of using shadows to draw attention to one particular object.

• Make sure that all your shadows look alike! If you use shadows on multiple objects in the same area, make sure that the shadows all go the same way, and make sure that the depth of the shadow is appropriate. If the shadows are all different and haphazard, people will notice.

• Don't make the shadows too dark. It's easy to go overboard and create deep, saturated shadows that overwhelm what's supposed to be getting all the attention: the foreground image. Keep shadows light and subtle. Figure 17.8 shows what can go wrong (and right).

  Figure 17.8. A too-dark shadow, a too-blurred shadow, a dark and badly positioned shadow, and one that finally gets it right.

  
  

  

Photoshop includes a powerful and easy drop-shadow function, along with the Glow, Bevel, Emboss, Satin, and Overlay functions, that will do wonders for type and graphics alike. You will find these effects in the LayerStyle submenu. Remember that you can use drop shadows and other layer styles on objects as well as on type. You can't apply a layer style to anything that's not on its own layer, though. Painting on the background, and then trying to add a layer style won't work.

Drop Shadows Should Drop I find that shadows often work better if they're below the original image; that is, moved down instead of up when they're offset. When the shadow falls downward, the object looks more like it's popping up.

Drop shadows can be tricky. When it looks right, you know it. Trust your eyes to tell you what looks realistic and what looks fake, and be willing to experiment with settings. Try making your shadow twice as blurred as your original setting, or twice as far offset. You might be surprised!

Variation: Shadows on Backgrounds

Of course, drop shadows don't have to occur just over white or solid-color backgrounds. You can have a drop shadow fall over a texture, an image, or anything else that strikes your fancy.