Introducing the Shadow WiFi extension for Photoshop.
Unfortunately, you still need to pay for WiFi because this is a Shadow Creation extension
and it claims to create flat or realistic shadows very easily.
And it also does all these things for the Green Tech.
We'll see how green they are later.
But the point is we already have Drop Shadows in Photoshop.
So why do we need this?
Here's the note from the creators - 'Drop Shadows in Photoshop often look unrealistic.
Shadowify WiFi allows you to create more natural shadows by applying stepwise blur.'
So they say it's all customizable so that you can also turn off Blur.
Is this translated from Chinese?
Anyway, the product does look interesting to me.
But with so many features already in Photoshop, do you really need this plugin / extension?
Let's find out.
So without any further ado, let's get started.
So here we are back in the brilliant world of Photoshop, and the way that it works is
this - first of all, select the layer for which you want to create a shadow.
So here we have a simple white background.
On top of that we have some text.
I want to create a shadow for the text.
So let's go ahead and select the text right there and open up the extension.
So here is the Shadowify extension.
There we go.
The second thing we need to do is to set the angle.
What angle do you want the shadow to follow?
This is not about the light.
Just as in Drop Shadow we determine the angle of light, this is not that.
This is the angle of shadow.
So, I want the shadow in this direction.
So, I'm going to set an angle of something like this, 123 degree or 120 degree looks
good to me.
The second thing we need to set is the length of the shadow and that is something you set
by manipulating distance.
So, how do you figure out what distance to use.
Use a Ruler in Photoshop.
So, Ruler is a very important and underrated tool in Photoshop.
You can find it over here.
If you cannot see it, it's in the Eyedropper group.
So, click and hold and you will find the Ruler tool.
So, I want the shadow to be this long.
So, I'm going to click and drag.
I want it to be this long.
Have a look at L. L is the length of the ruler that you just dragged in.
So, it's about 591 pixels.
So, I can make it smaller/larger, it will correspond to that.
I would like it to be this length.
So I'm going to set it to 400.
So Distance, you're going to set it to 400 pixels.
You can also clear up these Rules by clicking on Clear.
Now, the third thing is, well, there are lots of things.
For now, let's just create the shadow and see what it is.
We will manipulate the rest of the settings later.
So click on Create Shadow.
Now, this reminds me of shadows when I tried to play high risk games on a potato computer,
but, it really shows how this extension actually creates the shadow stepwise.
As you can notice, the steps of the shadow right here and with each step, the distance
between two shadows keeps on increasing.
Notice that carefully.
Seems like there are very less steps.
So let's go ahead and increase it.
Luckily, with this extension, you can undo, unlike most actions where you can't, you just
can undo - Ctrl or Command + Z, it's gone.
Now, let's redo it.
Now, I need to bring this up that while you can undo, unfortunately, you cannot adjust
things on the fly.
So let's say you created the shadow, just as we did before, and on the fly, you just
wanted to increase the steps of it, you cannot do it.
You will have to undo it by pressing Ctrl or Command + Z and then redo it by increasing
the steps.
So let's try increasing the steps.
Let's increase the steps from 20 to 200 this time, and let's go ahead and create a shadow.
This should work, but, I'm not very sure.
Have a look at this.
This still looks jagged, right?
Maybe the steps are still too low.
200 is not enough because the distance is 400 pixels.
So what if we put 400?
That should work, righ?
400 - 400 pixels distance?
It makes sense.
So,let's go ahead and try 400.
So we're going to put 400 right there and, well, it still doesn't look quite satisfactory.
Have a look.
I can still see the steps.
Maybe it is because the distance is increasing as the number of shadows increase.
Disappointment in my Photoshop abilities.
So maybe it's not the Steps, maybe it is the Blur.
So let's go ahead and try it.
What if we increase the Blur from 40 to 150?
Maybe it will be better.
So let's increase the Blur and let's decrease the steps to 200, because 400 is kind of too
much.
Delete the shadow, make sure the Shadow layer is selected, press the Delete key.
Select HELLO and let's go ahead and create the shadow.
Now, this is decent.
Have a look at this one.
It's better than before, it's not excellent, but it's better than before.
And it's something that we can work with.
I would use it, but in my opinion, it still needs some adjustments.
So, this is very dark around the edge.
So let's go ahead and decrease the Opacity to something like 70%.
That's better, or maybe 75%.
As you see the shadow is not clearly very nicely blending in with that of the white
background.
So we can clearly create a mask to make it softer.
So with the HELLO shadow layer selected, click on the Mask button right there.
And then with the Gradient Mask, click on the Gradient right there.
Just choose a gradient from black to white, just like this, and we're going to drag in
a Gradient.
There you go.
It's much softer that way.
And what if you want to change the direction of the shadow?
Look, I'm a very firm believer in non destructive workflows and it's great to see that they
have given a checkbox that allows me to uncheck Flattening or in other words, it allows me
to avoid merging all the layers.
But is that really helpful?
Let's take a look.
Now as you can see, this is the flattened version of the shadow.
You cannot change anything.
However, you can just uncheck Flattening right there and let's apply the same shadow again.
Just select the HELLO text and create shadow.
So here we have a group which is pretty nice.
Here's the before, here's the after.
And if you open up the group, have a look at it.
There are 20 copies.
Have a closer look..20 copies of the HELLO text and in each one of these copies, 10 filters
of Drop Shadows have been applied.
So that totals up to 20 x 10 = 200.
Right there, 200 steps.
So basically that's exactly what we did in this video where we created realistic shadows
using Drop Shadows by creating multiple drop shadows, but this one is in a much larger
scale.
Anybody who can open up and manipulate 200 filters of Drop Shadow should be given a Nobel
Prize for patience.
However, if you look at it closely, it's not all that bad.
There's some good reason behind this button.
Unchecking Flattening has a very practical use if you do one more thing, that is check
Global Light.
Have a look at this, there is this Global Light checkbox.
Now, this will check the Global Light check box wherever it applies Drop Shadow filter.
Again, how is that going to be helpful?
Well, this is a really good trick that we all must know.
Let's delete the shadows, I'm going to delete the group.
And this time, let's check Global Light and keep Flatten unchecked.
So select HELLO and this time again, create the shadow.
You can actually change the angle on the fly by going to Layer and then Layer Style.
Have a look at this one - Global Light.
Interesting, isn't it?
Now once you choose that, you can change the angle.
So I'm going to change the angle to, let's say, 175 and have a look.
Suddenly, it all changes.
Isn't that amazing?
You can easily change the angle just by coming to Global Light.
Now this is something which really impressed me about this extension.
I'm so happy that the creator thought about Global Light.
Whenever you are we applying and effect like Drop Shadow and you check Global Light, in
all of the drop shadow filters where you have checked Global Light, will respond to one
collective light source or Global Light source.
Now let me show you what Photoshop can achieve with its built in features and tools and whether
it can beat it.
So basically, I found two main ways in which Photoshop can replicate this effect.
Hold on to the second one because that is absolute favorite.
Starting with the first one - the Multiple Drop Shadow technique, the same technique
that we used in this video, but we're going to manually do it and see if it's worth it.
Double click on the right hand side of the HELLO text, just check in Drop Shadow.
I'm going to decrease the size and you can also change the color of the Drop Shadow.
Let's change it to the default Black.
So let's change it to Black and hit OK.
You can actually drag the shadows.
You don't have to play with the angles and stuff.
Just click and drag it just like this.
So I'm going to have it at this distance.
Looks nice to me.
And let's increase the size, that looks fine, and decrease the Opacity, just a little bit.
Now let's add one more Drop Shadow on top of it.
Click on the '+' sign right there.
And this one, I want to to bring a little closer.
Make sure you have checked Global Lights so that all shadows are in the same alignment.
So this time again, let's decrease the size and bring it just a little closer, like that.
If you want, you can also decrease the Opacity and click on the '+' again, one more shadow,
decrease the size even more.
Let's bring it even closer just like this.
That works.
Decrease the Opacity if you want to.
Click on the '+' again, decrease the size.
So this is something which we are doing manually.
Opacity is fine.
One more.
This one I'm going to bring even more closer and increase the Opacity so that we can actually
see what it is.
Keep it probably right here and then increase the size.
Yeah, that looks good.
Now control the Opacity.
Not bad at all.
Let's create one more.
And this one, we're going to bring it even closer and decrease the size, just like this,
and control the Opacity.
There we are, that was not bad at all.
Once you're satisfied with this, hit OK.
There you have it.
Now let's compare this with the extension.
This is the one that we just created, and this is the one with the extension.
Now in all seriousness for this technique, I believe that the shadow file extension does
a better job.
But if you need a lesser number of shadows and easier control, this is the way to go.
If you manually create Drop Shadows, there's one more advantage that you have.
You can actually go into settings of each one of these Drop Shadows and just change
whatever you want.
You can change the color, you can change the distance and the spread and the size; everything
you can do manually because there are less number of Drop Shadows, so you don't have
to mess with it all the time.
Plus, it's all one layer.
There are no 20 copies of layers with 10 drop shadows applied to each.
That can get a little confusing.
Now the second technique is something which blows my mindall the time and there's no match
for it.
Guess what it is.
Photoshop 3D.
See, when we are talking 3D, we are actually rendering these shadows by throwing real light
on it.
There is no fakery going on, no illusions, just pure real shadow.
Even Drop Shadow is an illusion, right?
So where we just feel the shape with a darker color, put it at a distance and blur it.
But the 3D technique actually calculates where the light is falling, where it's not reaching
and thus, create shadows.
And you'll be surprised how it even realistically creates reflections from those texts.
First of all, let's convert this background to 3D.
So we're going to convert it to a postcard.
So, select the background, let's go to 3d and then New Mesh from Layer and choose Postcard.
Now it's going to ask you - Do you want to switch to 3D workspace?
You can go ahead and choose Yes because that's more easy to work with 3D in that workspace.
So let's go ahead and close Shadowify.
We don't need this anymore.
Now we have the background in 3D, but we also want HELLO text to be in 3D . Here's what
we do.
Let's go to Type and then select Extrude to 3D.
Make sure that the Text layer is selected, just click on that.
Have a look at this.
This is the top view.
It's extended into 3D.
But there's a problem with this.
If you go back to the layers panel, the HELLO text and the Background are on separate layers,
so they don't respond to each other in 3D.
So we need to merge it.
So select the HELLO and hold the Ctrl or Command, select the Background as well and merge it.
Press Ctrl or Command + E. Now when you merge 3D layers, they don't rasterize like everything
else.
Press Ctrl or Command + E. Now they are one object.
Let me show you something interesting.
If I just rotate this and show this to you see how the HELLO is extruded.
It's looking fantastic, isn't it?
Now, let me just set the Camera right.
Let's go back to 3D and let's choose Current view.
And we're going to change the view to Default.
This is nice.
Now you can extend the HELLO as much as you want.
So I'm going to bring it a little bit to the front, just like this and extend it so that
it touches the postcard at the back.
So at the top, you can see there's a lot of gap in here.
So all you have to do is to come to the Text Properties, so let's bring it out right there,
and here, just increase the Extrusion Depth.
There you go.
I don't want so much of a depth, so I can just take it back, just a little depth.
There we are.
Now, there's no shadow here yet.
So how do we bring the shadow?
Think of it like real life.
In real life, if you want a shadow, what do you do?
Throw some light.
So, right now, there is this image based life, which is creating a very flat looking stuff.
We need to add lights in a direction.
So let's go to the Lights tab right there and let us open up the Properties.
Let's go to Window and make sure Properties is checked.
If you have a closer look, so I'm going to bring it at the top, there's this image based
light.
We don't want that.
Let's turn it off.
Now there's no light so that's why there's absolute darkness.
We need to add a directional light.
So click on the light, you can also add a Spotlight, but I'm going to add an lnfinite
Light.
It's easy to work with.
Now, you can move the direction of light in any direction you want and it automatically
creates the shadow.
Isn't that amazing?
So I'm going to leave it at that, something like this.
And now you can control the intensity by just clicking on the light, it increases the intensity.
And also you can increase the softness of the shadow by just increasing the softness
right there, as you can see.
How soft do you want the shadow to be?
Now once you have decided that, all you have to do is just render.
So click on the Render button.
Now take a look at this.
Isn't this looking amazing?
What's more interesting is, have a look at the reflection of the light.
See, the light is a jumping off the text and creating this golden reflection right here
on the wall.
Now this is totally impressive on an absolutely next level.
But there's a problem with this.
It's not actually a problem.
What if you want flat designs?
So, right now we have added 3D, but if you have a closer look, this extrusion is showing
up.
What if you don't want to see this extrusion as a result of 3D?
All you have to do is to change the Camera View.
So you need to choose a camera, which is very far apart from the text and then zooms in.
See when you're very far from your subject and then you zoom in just like in a telephoto
lens, you don't see so much of an extrusion.
And the opposite is if you take a wide angle lens, and just go closer to the subject, you
will see all of this.
So that's what we have to do.
So let's go to the View, let's go to this tab right there, click on Current View, and
we need to change the Camera to Orthographic.
Now, it doesn't look right, because we need to increase this to 1.
So let's dial in 1 there and there you have it.
It's the exact same thing, just a different view.
And now you can adjust the light accordingly.
Now, let me show you a few tricks about this.
So let's click on the Infinite Light.
And this looks nice to me.
All right.
Now, what I'm going to do is increase the Shadow all the way high and decrease the Intensity
of the light.
Because now, I'm going to add one more light.
Let's go to the Lights tab and click on the Light button right there and New Infinite
Light.
And this one, I'm going to add a different direction, just a little lower like this,
and make sure it's all soft, very soft, and decrease the Intensity just a little bit.
Maybe for the longer one, the first one, I don't want it to be so soft.
So you can add multiple lights, which is absolutely amazing.
So let's add one more.
Click on the Light and choose New Infinite Light.
And this time, I'm going to choose something like this.
And this one is going to be pretty soft and not that intense.
Now, let's render it and see how this one looks.
Maybe I need to decrease the Intensity, it's kind of too much.
So let's decrease the overall intensity of this one and this one as well.
And now let's render it.
Since rendering takes time, I made little adjustments in the Direction of light, Intensity
of light and Softness and this is what I got.
This is my final render.
Look at the reflection off of these letters.
That's what impresses me.
Now you can of course turn it off if you want to, but it's good have.
Now as for flat shadows, you can also create them super easily by using Photoshop 3D.
You can check out this tutorial on how to do that.
It's also very easy to customize.
As you can clearly see Photoshop 3D smokes this panel out.
Now the real question is, is this extension / plugin for you?
Let's go through the pros and cons.
As for the pro - Number one - it quickly creates the long shadow effect, but it does need a
little bit of practice.
Number two - I love that the extension comes with a checkbox that prevents it from flattening
the shadows and also apply Global Lights so that it can actually change the angle of all
the shadow filters at once.
Number three - if you try to manually create it with the Drop Shadow folder in Photoshop,
it's going to take a lot of time.
Number four - unlike Photoshop 3D, you do not have to render it every time you want
to move things around.
And yes, rendering does take a lot of time.
Now as for the cons - Number one, this is a big one - Photoshop 3D is just the best,
if you want the highest quality shadows and lighting.
If you're going for quality, there is, indeed, no match.
Number two - Although this is faster than Photoshop 3D, you cannot adjust things on
the fly.
For instance, let's say you want to make the shadows softer or decrease the length of the
shadows, it is tough.
Whereas in Photoshop 3D, all you gotta do is change the properties of light.
Just move the handle, that's it.
Number three - to be honest, it's just a little difficult to use.
Maybe with a little bit of practice, I will get a hang of it.
But at the moment having to dial all the numbers, doing hit and trial, I find it not easy to
use.
Just my personal opinion.
Is this the one for you?
Well, that for you to decide.
If you are in Envato Elements' member you can download it at no extra cost.
Try it and see if it's for you.
Or you can also get it as stand-alone at Creative Market.
I have both the links in the description and I'm not sponsored by anybody.
Thank you so much for watching.
This time around, I tried to do a different kind of video.
Please let me know if you enjoyed it and would you like to see more of these?
If there's something you want me to review or have a look at, let me know down in the
comments below as well.
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Thanks so much for watching.
I'll see you guys in my next one.
Till then stay tuned and make sure that you keep creating.