Gimp: How To Make a Shadow Off a Person Or an Object

In this Gimp Workshop tutorial we will see how we can make a shadow of a person. If you want to follow along, the download link for the images from the tutorial is in the video description. We need to have a background and a subject. Our subject needs to be isolated from its own background, like this one. Clicking on the eyes makes the layers invisible and visible again. The checkerboard structure is the transparency. The yellow dotted lines indicate the edge of this layer. First we make a duplicate of the subject layer. Make sure that the subject layer is selected. Click on the duplicate button at the bottom of the layers panel. Double click on the name of the layer and rename it shadow. Hit enter. Then we go to filters, light and shadow and click on long shadow. We make the angle as well as the length zero. And because the foreground color is black, we also have black as our color in the dialog box. When our foreground color is not black we can hit the D key to reset it to its default black. We change the composition to shadow only, and click okay. Make in the toolbox the unified transform tool active. Then click in the image to bring up the framework with the handles. In the top of your screen is a link to a tutorial about the unified transform tool. Clicking on this underlined arrow head detaches the dialog box from the canvas. We can now move it to where ever we want. First we click and drag the square handle in the top of the framework like so. Then we can transform the shadow further with the shear, the perspective and the scale handles. We can move it by click and drag inside the framework. And we can rotate by click and drag outside the framework. We have to pay attention of the direction of the light source, to create a natural looking effect. When we hold the Ctrl key and then roll the mouse wheel, we can zoom in and or out. Now we can position the shadow precisely. Go to view, zoom and fit image in window to make the whole image visible again. When we think it looks good, we can click transform. We will blur the edge of the shadow a bit. Go to filters, blur and gaussian blur. Make the blur radius about 5, and click okay. Now the shape of this shadow looks pretty good, but sometimes we have to make some more changes. Let us say that we want to make the shadow of the leg a bit shorter. Make the free select tool active. Zoom in to the leg. Now make a selection around the area of the leg. Click the last node over the first one and then double click inside the selection to confirm. Then we make the unified transform tool active again. Click in the image and transform the leg like so. We can, if necessary, make the image opacity in the tool options about 70 to have a better view on what we are doing. When it looks good, we click transform. We now have a floating layer in the layers panel. By clicking on the anchor, we anchor this layer on the one below. Now we have the shadow on one layer again. Press Ctrl+Shift+J to fit the image in the window. We can also delete parts of the shadow. Right click on the shadow layer and hit add layer mask. Make sure that you have white full opacity and click add. Then we make the paintbrush active. The default settings will suffice for now and we can erase parts of the shadow. When we press and hold the mouse wheel, the cursor changes into the move tool. We can then move the image by moving the mouse. When we click on the image instead of the layer mask, the image gets a white border to indicate that it is now active. We can then add a bit shadow instead of removing it. All done? Press Ctrl+Shift+J once more. We can reduce the opacity a little bit to make it look more natural. The amount depends on the characteristics of our image. Change the opacity to about 90. For this image a fairly hard shadow looks okay. But sometimes a gradient in the shadow might look better. Let us see how to make such a gradient. Press Ctrl+Z to undo the changes in the opacity. Click on the layer mask. Then make the gradient tool active. Choose the gradient foreground to transparency. Make sure that all the other settings are default. Click in the image to bring up the dialog box. There also appears a plus sign where we have clicked. Now click and drag this plus sign to make a line in the image like so. We can correct the gradient by moving the begin and or end point. These points can also be moved to outside the image borders. Moving the cursor over the line brings up a dot on the line. We can move this dot to make even more corrections. When it looks good, we hit enter to apply. And Ctrl+Shift+J again. Now the last thing we need to do, is to place the shadow layer below the subject layer. Click on the downwards pointing arrow at the bottom of the layers panel. And there we have a method to make a shadow of a person. I hope this tutorial helps you. Please take a minute to give it thumbs up and post a comment to support my channel. Thanks for watching.

Channel: gimp workshop

Views: 32,747

Rating: 4.9628868 out of 5

Keywords: gimp, gimp 2.10.8, gimp 2.10.6, gimp shadow, gimp long shadow, gimp long shadow filter, gimp drop shadow, gimp make shadow, gimp make shadow of person, gimp shadow of person, gimp shadow of object, gimp make shadow of object, gimp for beginners, gimp for dummies, gimp for novice, gimp for starters, gimp beginners tutorial, gimp step by step, gimp click by click, gimp vs photoshop, davies media design, my gimp tutorial channel

Id: T9Ies9zmLA0

Length: 8min 12sec (492 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 13 2018