Easy Shadow with a transparent png (for ps6)
This tutorial was written for ps6, may work with some small adjustments in other ps versions or in psp

For this tutorial I used one of my Futura gal. What? You don't have them? Well go grab them here, it won't cost you a penny! ;) You may also use any other transparent png to which you would like to add a shadow...

Open the futura*.png of your choice, I reduced mine so the height would be about 500 pixels... Select all and copy.

Make a new document 600X600 pixels and paste you Futura on a new layer.

With the Futura layer selected, go to Layers/Duplicate layer...

Make that layer invisible for now and select the first futura layer. Then go to Image/Adjust/Brightness-contrast and move those two sliders all the way down to -100. You may need to repeat this step a couple of times in order to get a silouhette that is completely black.

When you have your really black silouhette, you can make that second futura layer visible again but keep the silouhette layer selected. Now go to Edit/Transform/Perspective. Click on the top left corner and drag that little square down a bit, do the same with the top right corner. The bottom corners will go up when you do this...

Now drag the left corner a little bit to the left which will make the right corner move to the right...

And finally slide the little square at the top center to the left. Then click on the little check thingie at the top to apply the transformation...

With the move tool, move the silouhette so that its feet will match those of the futura on the top layer.

Go to Filters/Blur/Gaussian Blur and apply a setting of 3.0.

With the rectangular marquee tool, select the top half of the silouhette, then go to Select/Feather and apply a feather radius of 50 pixels. Then go to Filters/Blur/Gaussian Blur with a setting of 6.0.

Set the layer properties to Multiply with the opacity at 30% and you're done.

You can do what you want with the Background layer... And Voilà! A quick and easy way to give a little bit of dimension to your image...

Of course, you can play with the Transform/Perspective, the gaussian blur and the opacity of the layer to give you a longer or shorter, more or less defined and darker or lighter shadow...

Back to Tutorials - Home