Simple Photoshop tricks: Creating interesting drop shadows

Jun 23 2007

Continuing my series of very simple little techniques you can use in Photoshop, here’s a quick tip for making drop shadows on sidebars or similar look a little more interesting.

Fire up Photoshop and on a new layer create a sidebar-shaped rectangle that is the same colour as your background (I’m using white here). Now duplicate that layer, name it ‘Shadow’, and drag it below the sidebar layer in the Layers palette.

Double-click the Shadow layer and set a Color Overlay of a dark grey—you still won’t see anything, as it is completely obscured by the sidebar layer above it. Now select Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur and adjust the Radius until you’re happy with the look of the shadow (I used a Radius of 3.0).

Okay, fine—it looks just the same as if you’d used a regular Drop Shadow, right? Now here’s the trick; with the Shadow layer selected, hit Ctrl+T (Transform) and then hold down Ctrl (Apple key on Mac, I think) while dragging the corners of the bounding box. Drag the bottom corners towards the center of the box and up slightly (but to different heights), and drag one of the top corners down and out slightly—hit Enter when you’re happy with the positioning. You should have ended up with an interesting drop-shadow giving the effect that the sidebar is peeling away from the background.

Add some content, and there you go—a slightly more interesting effect than just using the preset Drop Shadow effect. You can take the idea further by creating the Shadow layer as a shape initially, and then adding anchor points to make the shadow corners more curved to further illusion of peeling away.

Filed under: Photoshop, Design.

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