Create a Realistic Shadow for Objects in GIMP

hello and welcome back to another video my name is mike davies and in today's tutorial i'll be showing you how to create realistic shadows using objects in i'm using version 2.10.28 which is the latest version of at the time of this tutorial [Music] before i get into that don't forget to check out my website at daviesmediadesign.com as always i have tons of video tutorials on here and free software help articles so definitely check that out you can enroll in my 2.10 masterclass from beginner to pro photo editing on udemy and you can get more by becoming a dmd premium member and i'll include a link to this as well as all the relevant links from this tutorial in the description of the video here is the photo i'll be using for today's tutorial just come over here to the little drop down arrow and i went with the large size click free download here is the final composition we'll be creating for today's tutorial so here is the realistic shadow so the first step for this tutorial is going to be creating a new document as well as bringing in the object that you're trying to create the shadow for in this case the pineapple so what i'll do is hit the shortcut key control n and that will allow me to create a new image you can also go to file new and i'll go with 1920x1080 and i want the background for this document to be white right now it's set to black so let me just swap this so that white is now my background color and i'll click ok next i'll open up the image of the pineapple so let me just navigate here using the file explorer to the location of this image and i'll just click and drag this onto my composition and release and i'll hit convert next what i'll do is hit shift s to grab the scale tool you can also grab this over here in the toolbox just click and hold and release your mouse on the scale tool and just click and drag one of these handles to drag it down and i'll hold the ctrl key as well as i drag this down and that's going to drag it from the center once you get it to the size you want and the position come over here and hit scale next what you're going to want to do is erase the background of the object i do have a ton of tutorials on how to erase backgrounds including one i just released recently on my channel so definitely check that out i'm not going to go through the full process just to save time but in this case i used the foreground select tool and i'll just show you what i did real quick so i'm just going to outline the object and hit the enter key and we can increase the stroke width and just paint the main foreground object here hit the enter key and then you can always clean this up hit the enter key when you're ready that will give you a selection and then with that selection come over here right click on the object and go to add layer mask and we're going to choose selection here and then click add and for the most part that will erase your background i'll hit ctrl shift a to deselect that which is also the same as going to select none so you can see this one is a bit sloppy because i didn't take any time to sort of clean this up but we do have a layer mask so let me just exit out of here and i'm just going to click and drag the one that i spent a bit more time on from the original composition so i'll just click and drag this onto the composition we're working on now once you're ready just come over here right click and come over to apply layer mask so now you'll have your object without the background and i'm going to crop the size of the layer down to the size of the object so just go to layer crop to content and let me just come over here click and hold the move tool and grab the alignment tool with this set to relative to image i'll click on the object you can see it's selected with the little boxes here and then i'm just going to click align center of target that's going to horizontally align this to the page and then let's switch back over to the move tool we can click on this and if i hold the ctrl key i can drag it up or down in straight line mode and release and i'm pretty happy with the location of that next we'll add the shadows so what we'll do is we'll use the object that's been cut out here as the shape of the shadow so to do that i can come over here and alt click on my layer if that doesn't work you can always go to layer transparency alpha to selection next what i'll do is come over here and create a new layer and i'll name this pineapple shadow fill it with transparency and click ok so right now if i just click and drag the color black into the selection area and release if i hold ctrl and zoom in you'll see some areas didn't really fully get filled in the reason for that is some areas inside the selection area are actually partially selected so let me hit ctrl z to back up so what i'll do to fix that is just go to select sharpen and now that gets rid of the partially selected areas and now i'll just once again drag and drop the color black into the selection area and now we can go to select none so obviously we have our pineapple shape i'm just holding ctrl and using my mouse wheel to zoom out next i'll add a blur to this so i'll go to filters blur gaussian blur and i only need a small amount of blur i don't need to overdo it so maybe somewhere between 20 and 25 in this case and come over here and click ok so now we need to put this into perspective so it looks like a shadow so to do that i'll come over here to my transform tool group and i'm just going to come over to 3d transform you can see we can also use shift w for the shortcut key and now i'm just going to click on the pineapple shadow layer and by the way under show image preview here in the 3d transform tool options make sure your image opacity is turned up enough to where you could see this so now we'll use the 3d transform tool to sort of bend the perspective of this so first i'll come over here to the third tab which is the rotate tab and now i'm just going to rotate this along the x-axis and you can rotate this as little or as much as you want so if you want a smaller shadow rotate it a lot if you want a longer shadow don't rotate it as much so let's go with about right there now what i'll do is come up and just click on the move tool or the move tab that's inside of the 3d transform tool and now we're just going to click and drag this so that it matches up with the bottom of the pineapple so if you want the light to be directly head on you can leave this as it is but i want the shadow to be sort of going this way so what i'll do is come over and i'm going to click on the camera option and you're going to see this little area this is the vanishing point so what i can do is click and drag the vanishing point and just move it around until it's in a spot where i like it doesn't really matter where you place it it's up to you unless of course you have a particular vanishing point that you want to match up with the shadow here so once that's in place once again you can come over here to the move tab or the offset area and just click and drag this so that it matches up here and now i can come over here and hit transform so next we're going to click and drag the shadow layer below the object and i'll hit the m key on my keyboard you can always move this around if you want to tweak the exact position so next what we'll do is we're going to change the layer boundary so you can see it kind of stops right here so let's go over here to layer layer to image size once i've done that i'll add a layer mask by clicking the layer mask icon and we'll go with white full opacity and click add and that will give us a blank white layer mask so now i'm going to grab the gradient tool and making sure our colors are set to black and white which you can do by clicking this little icon i'm going to come over here under the gradient tool options click on the gradient and go with foreground and background rgb make sure the shape is set to linear and also make sure offset is set to zero here and now i'm just going to click and drag this gradient and let me just swap the colors i think i have them backwards right now so you can use the reverse button there and now we're just going to adjust this and you can see that this is giving us a nice fade you can adjust the midpoint so bring the midpoint in or bring it out you can see some slight differences there and you can also drag the end point up a bit if you don't want the bottom to lose any of its opacity so once you're ready you can just grab a different tool like the move tool and you can see we have a pretty realistic shadow here i'm just going to perform a couple of extra steps here just to refine this a bit so first let me come over here right click and go to apply layer mask so now all of our shadow elements are on a single layer and i can always go to filters blur focus blur and this allows us to sort of apply a more realistic blur here to our shadow so it matches what a camera's blur might look like you can always increase or decrease this area and this is like the mid point here so you can see that's just adding a bit of depth of field to the shadow so let me click okay and next i'm just going to quickly adjust the colors of this so let me click on the original pineapple layer and go to colors levels and you can tweak the levels of this i do have an entire tutorial on color correcting using the levels tool i've done this ahead of time so i'm just going to use a preset so this is a previously used preset from my last session and i'll click ok and then i'll go to colors curves so once again we're going to go with the preset here i do also have an entire tutorial on the curves tool but i'll click ok next i'll sharpen this by going to filters enhance sharpen unsharp mask and so we're just going to add some sharpening here and click ok and finally what i'll do is grab the dodge and burn tool and what this can do is help make the artificial light look a bit more realistic so because the shadow is going this way it means the light is probably coming in this way so let me just create a new layer real quick name it lights this is not important you guys don't have to create the layer but the light is basically doing this right now so we can match that let me delete this layer by coming over here to the dodge and burn tool and if i scroll down you'll see the range is set to highlights my tool by default is set to burn and the exposure here is around 50. so let me increase the size of the brush so when i hold ctrl it's going to brighten up anything i paint over so you can see here this is adding some light let me hit control z you may not want to do this too many times because it might become too bright and then if i let go of the control key let me decrease the size of the brush i can paint the back area so it looks like the lights coming in from this direction and the last thing i'll do is add some lighting to the backdrop so it looks more like a realistic wall so we'll come over here to the background layer and create a new layer and i'll name this wall shading and hit the enter key grab the gradient tool so we still have the same settings from before and i'm just going to click and i'm holding the ctrl key to draw this gradient in straight line mode the midpoint here is a bit too far up so let's drag this down if you want to be exactly 50 you could change that to 50 and just click on here and hit the enter key to apply the gradient and next what i'll do is just decrease the opacity of this and you can see now it looks like we have a realistic wall all right so that's it for this tutorial hopefully you liked it if you did don't forget to like this video subscribe to my channel and click the bell icon to be notified each time i have a brand new tutorial you can check out any of the links to my resources in the description of the video but thanks for watching and i'll see you next time

Channel: Davies Media Design

Views: 44,466

Keywords: gimp, gimp tutorial, gimp for beginners, how to gimp, GIMP 2.10, GIMP, basics, GIMP 2021

Id: RpjV-9OH1tA

Length: 12min 51sec (771 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 14 2021