In this Photoshop tutorial, I'm going to show
you how to create the most realistic shadows in Photoshop in three steps. OK, so I've started with a layer on top. I've got many other tutorials where I show
you how to cut out and match colors. And things we're going to do is focus on the
shadow. So let's go down to the effects and choose
Drop Shadow. Now on the drop shadow, you want to set Opacity
to 100 and then set Distance Spread and size all of these to zero click. OK? You might just see a faint black outline around
there right now, but that's our shadow. And what we want to do is separate it onto
its own layer. So where it says Effects in the Layers panel,
right click and then choose Create Layer. Click OK. And if I hide a layer, you can see there's
a shadow now on a separate layer. Now step one, let's position and angle it. This is out of the three steps, remember? So let's select the layer with the shadow. Hit CTRL t. Come on. T on Mac brings up free transform. Now what we're going to do is we're going
to right click within here and we want to choose Flip Vertical. Great. Now let's just drag this down and we're just
going to line it up at the bottom. Now sometimes, as you see here, it's not going
to quite match. So we just rotate this slightly. Great. Now let's zoom out. In this case, I'm going to hold the alt key
and just use the scroll wheel on my mouse. And what we want to do is we want to skew
this at an angle so see where the light is coming from. So if you think about where that light is
coming from, from the light source. Let me just zoom in. So if we look at this, the light source is
here. You want to have that in a straight line,
basically following that shadow. So right click on the shadow and choose skew. And then we're going to skew that across. So the angle now is matching where the light
is coming from. Great. We also want to elongate this a little bit. So right click once again and notice I haven't
gone out of Free transform yet. And now I'm going to choose scale and I'm
going to drag it down. So we're stretching it a little bit. Notice all of these are done in one movement. Then we hit enter. Okay? So step one, we now have the position of our
shadow, but there's two things missing. If you look at a previous shadow on here,
notice as it gets closer to the subject, the edge is harder. It gets softer as it goes further away. Also notice that it gets more transparent
the further it gets away from the subject. Let's do that. Right now, with the shadow selected, let's
add the blur. Step two, filter. Don't choose blur choose Blur Gallery and
grab the field blur and you'll see this little icon will appear and we can drag this and
this is our blur. Now if we drag across here, we can increase
the amount of blur. Look at that. And of course we can take it right off the
page if we want. Okay, so we've got our blur and it's definitely
making the shadow look better. In fact, I'm going to go even more just so
we can really make this work. But the problem is as it gets closer to the
subject, we need it to be sharp. So just click to add another point. Now you could take the blur all the way to
zero. The way to do that is if you hold down Control
or command, double click that little pin, that will actually remove all the blur and
just set it to zero. But I feel like we want to put just a little
bit in there. So let's drag the little wheel here, grab
the amount of blur we want. That's definitely looking a lot better. Great. Okay, let's apply that click. OK, now the next step we need to do is we
need to make it fade as it goes away. I just want to move it up just a little bit
though. I'm going to hit CTRL T and let's just right
click and we're going to choose warp. And what I'm doing here is I just want to
pull that shadow up a little bit in that area so it's a little bit closer to our model. There we go. That's good. Got a little light coming through, which is
nice. Alright, let's fade it as it comes towards
the viewer. So what we want to do is add a layer mask. Once we've selected a layer mask, we're going
to choose a gradient. So hit the D key to reset foreground background
colors. Choose the gradient tool. Set it to either black to white or foreground
background linear. The mode should be normal and opacity at 100. Now I'm going to drag up just to check which
way it's going. Yes, it's going the way I want. Okay, so what I want to do, notice that the
shadow is definitely fading, but that's a little bit more than what we need. So I'm actually going to start it off the
screen and pull it up this way. And notice now we get this fade is kind of
fading away. By the way, that was step number three, was
the fade. So what we're going to do is choose the mask
with the Properties panel open. Density. Did you ever wonder what that does? Density is like opacity for a mask. So let's just dial in the amount of density
we want. So it's fading away. I feel like the shadow is a little strong
overall. So choose the shadow layer and drop the opacity
down just a little bit. There we go. Let's go back to our mask, pine tune our density. And here we go. A very realistic looking shadow. We can hide the shadow as before and after. Let me know in the comments underneath if
you learned anything new. And if you guys haven't yet subscribed or
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