Hey, welcome back to the PhotoshopTrainingChannel.com,
I'm Jesus Ramirez. In this video, I'm going to show you several
techniques to create highly realistic shadows in Photoshop.
As always this is going to be an information pack tutorial.
So make sure that you stick around until the very end of the video so that you don't miss
a thing. If you want to follow along with me, then
you can click on the tutorial images link below in the description.
Let's jump right into today's tutorial. This is the document that we're going to work
with. It contains three layers.
We have a background and a highlights layer they will help our composite just feel a little
more realistic. It's not perfect, but it will help us get
the results that we want in this tutorial. And let me first show you what most people
show in Photoshop tutorials when teaching how to create a shadow, basically they ask
you to create a layer below the main subject in this case, our action star.
And by the way, here's the trick for you, if you hold control and Windows command on
the Mac and click on the new Layer Mask icon, you'll create a layer below your currently
selected layer. And I'll rename this layer to shadow so that
I know what it is. And that for this point, usually the instruction
is to fill with black. Black is currently my foreground color.
So I can fill a bit black by pressing Alt and backspace option backspace on the Mac.
And from this point, most tutorials will tell you to transform the selection, but first
I need to de-select. So I'll press control D on Windows, Command
D on the Mac. Then press control T to transform that's Command
T on the Mac and right click and select flip vertical, and click-and-drag down until the
shadow matches her foot. Basically, this is what most people tell you
to do and this has a lot of problems.
First of all, if you simply select black as the shadow color, you're not going to get
realistic shadows because shadows are not black.
If you look at any photo, the shadows always have a little bit of color.
You can, for example, zoom in into this photo, into the shadows and select one of the shadows
with the eyedropper tool. And you'll see that there is a little bit
of blue in there. Even the ones here on the ground have a little
bit of brown in them. The sand back here also has a bit of color,
no matter what you select, there's always a bit of color in the shadow, so never really
true black. So you would need to fix that.
Another issue with doing what I just showed is that the feet are not touching the shadow
as they should be in the real world. So that becomes a problem.
And the third problem that we have is that the shadow is not following the perspective
of the scene, so it doesn't look realistic. And I often see a lot of people using this
technique or a variation of it to create shadows. Let me know in the comments, if you've seen
something like this in the past, obviously this doesn't look very realistic.
And in this tutorial, I'm going to show you how you can fix the issues that I just described
to create more realistic shadows. So I'm still going to work with that same
shadow layer. It's actually not a bad idea to start the
way that we started, but I'm going to now adjust it.
And I should probably mention that in some cases I'll make extreme adjustments for the
purposes of the tutorial. And I probably wouldn't do certain things
in a real project, but I just want to make things easy to see for you.
And the first thing that I'm going to do is work with the color.
So I'm going to select one of the darker shadows here.
Like maybe that dark blue there, I'll press OK and here's another keyboard shortcut that
you probably don't know if you hold Alt shift and tap in the backspace key on Windows that's
option, shift, delete on the Mac, you'll fill with the foreground color, but only on opaque
pixels. In other words, pixels that are not transparent.
And actually I've already filled the layer. So let me zoom in so that you can see the
result, I'll undo so you can see the difference before and after.
Once again, the keyboard shortcut for that is Alt, shift and backspace option, shift,
delete on the Mac to fill with the foreground color only on opaque pixels.
But anyway, so now that I have that color on there, I'm going to change the blending
mode to multiply and then bring down the opacity just a little bit like so.
The shadow's too sharp right now and I will need to blur it, but we will worry about that
in a later step.
First let's work on the shadow's perspective so that it matches our scene.
I'll start by selecting the move tool and pressing control T on Windows, Command T on
the Mac to transform the layer then right-click and select perspective.
And I'm going to zoom out by holding Alt on Windows options in the Mac,
and scroll down on my mouse wheel and click-and-drag on this corner handle and drag to the left.
And you can see now how the perspective is more closely reassembling the perspective
in the scene. So I can place that right about here.
And I'm also using the lines that you see here on the ground with these tiles.
They create these converging lines that go into the vanishing point.
So I'm actually using those same lines to try to match the shadows in my scenes so that
the perspective of the shadow matches the perspective in the composite.
When you're done, you can click on the check Mark to commit the changes.
So now we fix the color, the perspective, and now we have to make sure that the shadow
is touching the elements in the scene, for example, her feet.
And one of the easiest ways to make this work is to use the puppet warp tool.
You can go into edit, select puppet warp that will place a mesh over your image.
I don't always like using the mesh so I'll disable it by clicking on this checkbox, in
the options bar. Next, you can create these pins by simply
clicking over the image. These pins will allow you to distort the pixels
in this layer. And I'm going to create several pins that
will also hold it down so that they don't move when I make an adjustment.
So let me zoom in so that I can show you what I'm doing.
So at this point, select then I'm just going to click-and-drag it over onto her foot like
so. Make sure that it touches.
And then if I want the heel to also touch, I can hold Alt on Windows, option on the Mac
and I get this circular overlay and I can click-and-drag to rotate it like so, and then
I'll click-and-drag back up like this. Maybe drag a little bit more.
That looks pretty good. Then if I need to, I can work on this foot.
Maybe I need to rotate it as well, just a tiny little bit, just so that it matches as
best as possible. And you can also create another point on this
side and then c- control it if need be. Totally up to you in this case I think that
this is looking pretty good.
This foot is not actually on the ground. She's standing on her toes with her left foot,
the one on our right side. So this side doesn't need to be touching because
that's not really what's going on. So the shadow should be more or less right
in this area. So that looks pretty good.
I'll click on the check mark to commit the changes.
Then I'll double click on the handle to fit the image to screen and that looks much, much
better. What I'll do now is I'll blur the shadow.
So I'll go into filter, blur, Gaussian blur, and just give it an appropriate blur for that
composite. In this case, maybe we'll go with three pixels
that seems to work okay. And what I'll do now is create another shadow
below our shadow layer, or it could be above, it doesn't have to be below, but I'm going
to do it below.
And I'm going to use the same blue that I used earlier, the same dark blue.
And what I'm going to do is create my contact shadows.
So there's always a shadow that is darker, where the object is making contact with the
surface, by the way, I'm tapping on the left bracket key to reduce my brush size.
And I'm just going to click and paint these shadows like so just, where they're making
contact with the surface. By the way, in Photoshop 2020 and newer, you
can use the tilde key, that's the key to the left of the keyboard under the escape key.
And you can use that key to erase with the currently selective brush, so I'll use that.
In older versions of Photoshop, you're going to have to go into the eraser tool or an alternative
will be to change the blending mode from normal to clear, and then you can erase with the
brush that you're currently using. So now that I have my contact shadow there
I'll move on to the other foot by holding the space bar and clicking-and-dragging to
pen and then I'll create my contact shadows here, like so.
And maybe I'll blur these as well. I'll go into filter, blur, Gaussian blur,
and blur them as well, like so. And I can just call this layer contact shadow,
and I'll double click on the hand tool to fit the image to screen.
The image is looking much, much better. What I'll do now is select the shadow layer,
click on the layer mask icon to make a layer mask.
Then I'll go into the gradient tool, make sure that I have black to white selected.
Then make sure that you have reversed unchecked, and you can come to the bottom of the [inaudible
00:09:31], click-and-drag up by holding shift to create a straight line and you'll create
that effect that you see there. You could also unlink the layer mask from
the layer and with the move tool, you can click-and-drag on the mask and adjust that accordingly.
You can also click-and-drag on this handle and control that shadow like so.
So in this case, I'll make it pretty tall and click-and-drag down like so.
And you can obviously adjust the opacity accordingly. And at this point, all you need to do is fine
tune the image. I think that the shadow is still a little
sharp. So I'm going to go back into that shadow layer
and go into filter, blur, Gaussian blur, and just blur it just a tiny bit more, maybe two
pixels and press OK. I think that this looks very good.
What do you think? Make sure that you let me know your thoughts in the comments below.
Also, if you enjoyed this tutorial, make sure to check out my video on matching a subject
to a background. It's a complete step by step tutorial on compositing.
I'll place the link in the description. Also, if this is your first time at the
Photoshop Training Channel, then make sure that you don't forget to click
on that subscribe and notification buttons. Thank you so much for watching.
I'll talk to you again in the next Photoshop tutorial.