In this video, I'm going to show you how to create realistic shadows in Photoshop.
Hi!
Welcome back to the Photoshop Training Channel.com.
I'm Jesus Ramirez.
In this video, I'm going to show you an amazing way of creating realistic complex cast shadows
in Photoshop.
Getting shadows right is really important in compositing, because when you get them
right, your whole composite looks more cohesive, your subject fits better within the scene,
an everything just works out so much better.
The difficult part is getting the right shape and perspective of the shadows within your scene.
Most of the techniques that I've seen involve some sort of layer transformation.
In other words, you're distorting pixels to try to get the right shape and the right perspective.
And this can become really difficult with complex objects.
And this is what this tutorial's all about,
how to create realistic shadows and keep the right shape and the right perspective.
And we're going to use Photoshop's 3D features for that.
I'm going to show you advanced techniques, but don't let that scare you.
I'm going to divide up this tutorial into small digestible chunks so that you can follow
along, even if you're a Photoshop beginner or if you're new to Photoshop's 3D features.
Feel free to use any composite to follow along.
The images are not that important.
Okay, let's get started.
Before we dive into the 3D portion of this tutorial, I'm going to show you how most people
create shadows in Photoshop.
It's not necessarily a bad technique, but I'm going to show you why it's more difficult
to do it that way, and that way you can compare with the actual technique of this tutorial.
So, I'm not going to spend too much time on that.
So, we have a background, and this foreground element, which is a horse.
It's a very simple composite.
And usually to create shadows you would simply double click on the side of the layer.
That brings up the Layer Style dialog box, and you can click on Drop Shadow.
And that, of course, creates a drop shadow based on the shape of that layer, in this
case, the shape of the horse.
Then you would just simply press okay, and then right click on this FX icon, and select
Create Layer.
That creates layers based on your Layer Styles.
In this case, we only have one Layer Style, the drop shadow, and that's what we have.
Horse's Drop Shadow.
And I can click-and-drag that around, and place it anywhere.
This is an actual pixel layer, so we can do anything that we want to it.
For example, transform it.
You can press Ctrl T, Command T on the Mac for transform.
Right-click and select Distort.
And at this point, you would just distort the shadow so that it matches your scene.
As you can see, this is a very powerful technique.
The downside is that there's a lot of manual labor involved, and you have to really match
that shadow onto the ground.
And I'm trying to match the perspective of the ground plane where this horse is sitting
so that I can match the shadow, or so that the shadow can look realistic.
And in this case, it's not looking realistic because the face is facing the wrong way.
So I would right-click and select Flip Vertical.
And now the face is facing the right way, but now the perspective is off.
So, you can see that there's a lot of fine tuning that you need to do if you're going
to use this technique.
Again, there's nothing wrong with it.
But in my opinion, it could take a while to get the shadow looking realistic.
And even though this looks okay, there's another method that I want toshow you that actually
helps things look even more realistic.
So, what I'm going to do is I'm just going to click-and-drag this layer onto the trash
icon, and we're going to work with Photoshop's 3D feature.
So, I'm going to click on the horse layer.
Then I'm going to duplicate it by pressing Ctrl J, Command J on the Mac.
This will become a 3D layer, and it will be a disruptive effect, so you always want to
keep a layer with the original content.
So, on this horse copy, I'm going to double-click on the name, and rename it shadow.
Then I'm going to go into 3D, new 3D extrusion from selected layer.
And by the way, if your 3D menu is grayed out, it's probably because your computer does
not meet the minimum requirement for Photoshop 3D.
If you don't know what the minimum requirements are, then don't worry.
I'm going to place a link down below in the description that will link to Adobe's website,
so you can see what those requirements are.
But anyway, this is going to make that layer into a 3D model.
The best way of thinking about how Photoshop creates 3D objects is to think about a dough
cutter or a cookie cutter.
In Photoshop, 3D objects are created by being extruded into the Z axis.
So, you take a 2D shape and push it back into the Z axis to create a 3D object, much like
pushing Play-doh through a dough cutter.
In this case, we extruded the shape of the horse.
If you want toknow more about 3D, I have a whole bunch of 3D tutorials that you can watch.
I'll place a link to the playlist right below in the description.
So, I'm not going to spend too much time explaining how Photoshop 3D works.
I'm only going to explain the tools that are relevant to this tutorial.
The first thing that you have to realize with 3D is that the Canvas is actually a camera,
and this is what the camera sees.
On the bottom left, we have three icons that control the camera.
Notice that when I click-and-drag on the far left icon, the Orbit 3D Camera icon, I can
orbit around this 3D layer.
See that?
See how that horse is now an extrusion of that shape?
I'm going to undo that, just so we can get back the default camera.
And then, the 3D model has these icons that we could use to rotate, move, or scale the
3D object.
Notice that if I move the 3D object high up, I can move it back down onto the ground plane
by going into the properties panel, and under coordinates, select move to ground.
This places the 3D object on the ground plane.
The Ground Plane is this grid that you see here.
The ground plane also interacts with the lights in the scene.
Notice how the ground plane is catching this shadow.
So we're going to use that ground plane and match it to the ground of the image, so that
we can cast a shadow onto it.
And in order to do that, we need to make sure that we have the right perspective in the
scene.
I have a tutorial all about perspective.
I highly recommend watching it if you're into compositing.
So I'm not going to go into too much detail here, but when you composite images together,
you have to make sure that the perspective matches.
The best way of doing that is to make sure that the horizon line of both the background
and your foreground elements match.
In this 3D scene, you can see these lines here.
All these lines meet up on the horizon line,
which is represented by this line going across the canvas.
So, if I match the 3D scenes horizon line
with the photo, we should have an image
that matches in perspective.
So, I'm going to undo all these movements, just so that I can go back into the original
perspective of the scene.
And I'm just going to click-and-drag the orbit 3D camera icon to rotate the camera.
And I'm trying to match the horizon line to the horizon line of the background.
And basically what I'm doing is just looking at these converging lines in the scene, all
these lines, and trying to estimate where they meet.
Another way of thinking about it is where does the ground plane meet the sky.
And I'm making an assumption.
I think it ends right about here.
And just from experience, I'm probably right.
If you don't know what I just said and what that means, again, I highly recommend watching
that video on perspective where I explain it step by step.
But anyway, make sure that you match the horizon line of your 3D scene to the horizon line
of your background.
And again, just to drive the point further, I'm going to try to match this blue line to
the line on the street, even though I don't really have to, just so that you can see that,
that's what I'm doing.
Notice that as I match this blue line here on my ground plane to the white line on the
street, I get a perspective that more or less matches.
And again, I don't have to be too precise, and that's okay.
Then I can move the horse so that it matches the horse in the composite.
And I'm using the pointy icons here to move in the X axis, and I can move them on a different
axis if I need to.
But that's going to be okay.
Also notice how far the horse was extruded.
We don't need the horse to be extruded that far.
So, I'm going to click on this shadow element here that's our 3D model.
Then click on this icon, which is the mesh, and then I can change the Extrusion Depth
so that it's not so thick.
So then you can adjust the thickness of that horse.
And that thickness seems to work.
Then I can click on the infinite light, which controls the light of this scene, and I can
use this overlay, and click-and-drag on it to adjust the lighting.
Also, when I adjust the lighting, watch what happens to the shadow on the ground plane.
The shadow down here.
See how the shadow is interacting with the ground plane and the background?
I'm not really concerned with the 3D model.
I'm only concerned with the shadow.
So, now I can just match the shadow of the scene and create a much more realistic horse
shadow than what I did with the layer styles.
So, it'll give me a much more realistic result.
So, in this case, I could look at the shadows of the other elements of the scene and try to match it.
So, I can just place a shadow anywhere I want.
And even though this is not exactly realistic, the light is really not coming from this angle,
it does a really good job representing how this technique works.
Also, I'm noticing that the 3D model's still a little too thick.
So, I'm going to click on the shadow object which is a 3D model,
and reduce the thickness even more.
So, I have it here at about 19 pixels.
And then I'm going to click on the infinite light once again.
And I can also increase the softness.
So, notice how I can increase how blurry that shadow is.
So you can adjust that as well.
The one thing that you will notice is that the shadow will be noisy.
That's because it has not been rendered.
So, when you're working with 3D, you need to render anything that you put out.
So, you can click on the Marquee Tool,
make a selection around your shadow,
and then click on the Render button.
This may take a while depending on the speed of your computer.
In my case, it's going to be fairly quickly.
It's going to be about 30 seconds.
Also, when you're rendering, if you see that the render's not looking the way you want,
you can just stop the render or cancel the render by pressing the escape key on the keyboard,
and that stops that render.
And when you stop the render, you can actually use it if you want to, and that's what I'm going to do.
I'm going to use it for this example.
So, I'm just going to go back into the layers panel.
And since I'm happy with this shadow, I'm just going to rasterize it and make it into
a regular pixel layer.
So, I'm going to right click on that layer and select Rasterize 3D.
So, that will make it into a regular pixel layer.
It's no longer a 3D model.
And I'm going to place that shadow below the horse, and I'm going to press V on the keyboard
to select the move tool, and I'm going to click and drag and position that shadow accordingly.
I can even use the arrow keys on the keyboard to move that around.
The only thing I'm concerned about is the shadow.
I'm not looking at anything else.
So, that shadow looks pretty good there.
And I'm going to hold alt, option on the Mac, and click on the layer mask icon.
If you do that, you'll create a mask which is completely black instead of white.
What that means is that this mask is now hiding every pixel in this layer.
Then I'm going to click on the brush tool, and I'm going to paint with white.
Notice that white is my foreground color.
And I'm just going to paint on that layer mask to reveal that shadow (pause) like so.
I'm going to zoom in.
There's a small problem here, but that's easy to fix.
I can just select the Move tool, move the shadow so that we don't have those edges.
In this area, we do have edges, but that's okay.
I'm just going to use just a hack here.
I'm going to use the Smudge Tool,
and I'm going to smudge those pixels and make sure
that the focus, the white outline, is on the layer thumbnail and not on the layer mask thumbnail.
And then you can just push those pixels in.
So, quick little hack there for you.
Also notice that sample all layers is not checked.
If it is, I will also affect the actual horse.
So, make sure you disable that when you do this.
So, I'm going to go back and select the brush tool, select the layer mask, and then paint
with the white in this area to reveal the shadow behind the foot there.
I'm going to double click on the hand tools to fit the image to screen.
And as you can see, we have a very realistic shadow.
Let me know in the comments if you plan on using this technique.
You can simply type, "Yes I will," or "No, I won't."
And if you like, let me know why.
And if you do decide to create something using the techniques in this tutorial, then feel
free to share it on Instagram with the hashtag
#ptcvids.
Also, don't forget to click on that subscribe and notification buttons.
And if you want to learn more about Photoshop 3D,
then check out my Photoshop 3D playlist here on YouTube.
Thank you so much for watching, and I will talk to you again in the next tutorial.