in today's video I'm sharing two powerful techniques you can use to add a shadow effect
in Photoshop I'll be adding the shadow to text in this video but you can use the same techniques to
apply a shadow to objects we'll start by selecting the Photoshop horizontal type tool to create the
text then in the toolbar I can choose the color I want to use which in this instance is red I'll
then click on the image where I want to add my text and you can see a couple of highlighted words
appear let's add the words Shadow text to the the image we can then click the tick icon in the
toolbar to apply the changes you can see that this has created a new text layer in the layers window
because this is a text layer we can continue to adjust it with the controls in the properties
window let's change the size of this text to 72 points this first method of adding a shadow to the
text is with the Photoshop layer Styles you can access these at the bottom of the layers window
by clicking the FX icon this lists the different styles that you can apply to this layer I'm going
to select the drop shadow effect as soon as I add that you can see that the shadow appears behind
the text and we see the layer Styles dialogue open let's run through some of the controls that you'll
probably want to use first we have the color of the Shadow when I click the color swatch it opens
the Color Picker we can then use this to change the color to anything we think might work for this
text I'm just going to use a black shadow below this is the opacity slider which controls the
strength of the Shadow the higher the opacity the darker and more obvious the shadow appears and if
we reduce the opacity it makes the shadow lighter then we have the angle control which is a circle
with a line in it if I click this and drag the line with my mouse I can rotate the angle of the
Shadow then to the right of this is another option which is to use Global light when we set this it
tells Photoshop to use the same Shadow Direction for all drop shadow effects in this image if we
don't have this checked it allows us to set a different Shadow direction for different layers
which could look odd further down the dialogue we have a distance slider which creates the illusion
of moving text away from the shadow then there's the spread slider which is a little like applying
a stroke effect around the shadow you'll probably use a low value for that for most shadows and then
finally we have the side slider which softens the edge of Shadows the higher you set this the more
blur is applied to the shadow we can then apply the settings to the Shadow by clicking the okay
button now looking at the layers panel we can see the effects listed below the layer I only have the
drop shadow effects at the moment but I could add others and they would appear in this list we then
have an ie icon to the side of the effect which I can use to toggle the shadow off and on there's
then another I icon next to the the effects heading which will toggle all the layer effects
off and on as you've seen this is an easy way to add a shadow effect to text let's clear this
now and look at another an easy way to remove the layer Styles is by right clicking on the effects
heading and selecting the clear layer style option from the popup menu for the next example I will
show you how to manually create a shadow for the text I'll start by duplicating my text which I
can do using the keyboard shortcut command plus J if you're using a Windows PC that's controll and
J our image now has two identical text layers one covering the other I'm going to select the
lower of the two layers and use that to produce my shadow I'll then change the Shadows color by
clicking the color swatch in the properties window this allows me to change the text to
be black you can't see it now because the top layer is covering it if I hide that you can see
the black text the next step can seem confusing if you haven't used smart objects before but please
stay with me I'll first select the black text layer in the Lay's window by clicking it then I
can go to the filter menu and choose the convert for smart filters option this converts to text
layer to something called a Photoshop smart object now I can go to the filter menu and under the blur
submenu choose Goan blur this displays the Goan blur filter dialogue where I can control the blur
level I can then click the okay button to close that applying the Goan blur filter in Photoshop
is a destructive edit meaning we can't change the blur amount but if you look at the layer
we can see that we have a Goan blur smart filter appearing below the layer when I double click it
it reopens the Goan blur dialogue and I can change the value this is why we converted the layer to a
Smart object now let's move the Shadows so that it appears more like the shadow we saw before
for that I'm going to select the move tool this displays a box around the text and if I use the
arrow key on my keyboard I can move a position of a shadow this now looks like the drop shadow we
applied earlier but we can get more creative with the shadow if I click the edit menu and come down
to the transform option I can choose to flip the selection vertically if I move the shadow down
you can see that it looks more like a reflection let's return to the edit menu and look at some of
the transform options again this time I'm going to select the perspective option Photoshop then
displays a message saying that it will turn off the smart filter but this is only temporary if I
click okay you can see that the gojan blur smart filter isn't applied having done that I can click
and drag the shadow to move it sideways making it look like there's light coming from behind
the text I'll also use this opportunity to get the shadow into position so so that it lines
up with the text when I'm happy with that I can click the tick icon in the toolbar to apply the
change if the amount of the blur on the shadow is too large we can open the goian blur dialogue and
adjust it finally we can adjust the opacity of a smart object to control its transparency making
it look more like a shadow but that's not the end of the adjustments we can use if we go back
into the edit menu and check the transform options we'll see there's a distort option when I select
that it allows me to change the perspective of the Shadow and the size earlier in the video
we said you could apply these techniques to text and objects the second Technique we looked at is
probably the best for this and if you want to see how that's done watch this video next thanks for
watching today and I hope you've enjoyed the video don't forget to subscribe if you haven't already
and please share this with other Photoshop users I'll see you soon for another video