A tweet of a psdtuts+ tutorial from last year on drop shadows made me realize that lately I've gotten a bit lazy about my drop shadows. I'll often add them without giving any real thought to what they represent. This, despite having written an extensive tutorial awhile back on the proper use of drop shadows. So, this morning I've rounded up series of articles that address the use of drop shadows. Your challenge is to start building better drop shadows for all your new projects.
fter you've learned the science of drop shadows as discussed in the tutorial, above, learn how to create them in the software of your choice:
- Adobe Photoshop Basics lesson on the basics of adding a drop shadow manually (without layer styles).
- How to Use Drop Shadows in Photoshop is the psdtuts+ tutorial I mentioned that details how to use the alll the options in the drop shadow layer styles dialog.
- The drop shadow tips in this tutorial by Jennifer Farley shows how to use shapes and gaussian blur to create custom drop shadows in Photoshop.
- InDesign does drop shadows too. Creating Sophisticated Drop Shadows shows how to enhance text and graphics and goes through the various blending modes you can use.
- A Vector Drop Shadow in Illustrator is a bit more complicated than most drop shadows in photo editing software.
- Create Non-Raster Drop Shadows goes into a bit more detail on different types of drop shadows in Illustrator.
Like it says, after time we can get lazy about using drop shadows. This is a simple reminder to properly place those shadows, because come on, even I get tired about it. But to have a professional look, we must better or knowledge about drop shadows.