If you're cutting out backgrounds from
product shots in Photoshop, don't try to paint the shadows in by hand.
Instead, keep the original shadows.
The professional technique you will learn today will maintain everything editable so
In this case, I'm simply going to click on
the remove background button here on the taskbar.
The results are not going to be perfect, and that's okay for this tutorial.
In your image, do spend some time fine-tuning the smaller details.
If you don't know how to do that, then
check out my tutorial, How to Remove Backgrounds in Photoshop for Beginners.
I'll leave a link below in the description.
But again, for the sake of time, in this
video, we're just going to work with the mask we have now.
Next, I'll duplicate this headphones layer.
You can do so by pressing Control J on Windows.
That's Command J on the Mac.
This bottom layer will be the shadow.
Always name your layers.
That way you know what they do.
In this case, I'll call this one shadow.
Now, the next step is to make sure that this layer only shows the shadows.
Let me show you how to do that.
I'm going to delete the layer mask because we don't need it.
What we're going to do now is blend the shadow layer with the background.
To do so, I'm going to use a blending mode.
If you click on the drop down here, you'll see a list of blending modes.
And all the blending modes between this
line and this line will hide the bright pixels but keep the darker ones.
For shadows, in most cases, you want to use multiply.
In some cases, color burn can work, but multiply is good for this example.
Now, the downside of doing this is that we
still have the headphones, and that could create some issues along the edges.
To make sure that doesn't happen, I'm going to hold Alt and click on the layer
mask icon to hide the contents of that layer.
So that layer is completely hidden now.
I'm just going to reveal the shadow by
enabling the brush tool and painting with white.
White is now my foreign color.
Make sure that when you paint, you paint
with a larger brush and a hardness set to zero so that the edges are soft.
And in this case, the brush is a little too big for me, so I'm going to use the
left bracket key on the keyboard to reduce the brush size.
Then I'm just going to paint the shadows in like so.
And that looks very, very good.
If you make a mistake like I did here and reveal some of those edges, you can press
the X key to switch the foreground color to black and paint those edges away.
Everything looks fantastic.
Now, let me show you how to make this shadow even more realistic.
First, I'm going to go into the adjustment
layer icon and create a levels adjustment layer.
I'm going to clip this layer to the layer
below by clicking on this icon, or you can use the keyboard shortcut, Control Alt G.
Clipping a layer means that
this adjustment layer will only affect the layer directly below it.
This is what this downpointing error represents.
I like to delete layer masks if they're not controlling anything.
It just keeps the Layers panel cleaner and easier to see.
So now that I have this levels adjustment
layer clipped to the shadow layer, I can go into the properties panel and use
the Gamma Slider to increase or decrease the intensity of the shadow.
Which is fantastic.
And of course, I can use the other sliders as well.
But in most cases, the Gamma Slider is all you will need, and maybe the white point
here, dragging it to the left to remove any other random edges.
But in this case, I don't need that.
Now let's work with another very important aspect of the shadow, which is the color.
So currently, the multiply blending mode is making the background just a little bit
darker, and it's using the actual colors that are found in the shadow.
You can see that the The shadow is not completely white.
There's some color in there.
By the way, you can enable and disable a
mask by holding the shift key as you click.
The red X indicates that the mask is disabled.
But anyway, sometimes the color can affect the background and create issues.
In this case, it might not be too
noticeable, but there is definitely some color issues going on here.
To fix that, go into the Eyedropper tool.
By the way, I have all layers enabled and I'm doing five by five average.
Then I'm going to disable the shadow layer
and just click here, right up against the background, reenable it again.
By the way, that color that I clicked on is now my foreground color.
Now I'll click on the Levels Adjustment layer.
Then I'll create a new solid color.
And Photoshop will automatically select the color I sampled.
I'll press okay.
I'll delete the layer mask because I don't need it.
Again, you don't have to do that.
Just the habit I have.
You can then press Control Alt G to clip this layer to the layer below below.
You can see that the down-pointing arrow
is telling us that we're only affecting the shadow layer now.
What we want to do now is make sure that the color is the only thing affecting the
layers below, not the luminosity and not the saturation.
We're going to do that with a blending mode.
We have a group of blending modes here at
the bottom between this line and this line.
Hue, Saturation, Color, and Luminosity.
Simply explain, Hue is the color, Saturation is the
intensity, Luminosity is how bright something is.
In this case, if we select luminosity, we
keep the brightness of the layer that we're on.
If we select saturation, we keep the saturation.
If we choose color, we keep both the
saturation and the hue, but we don't want that.
We just want the hue, so make sure you select hue.
Look at the difference. This is Hue and this is Color.
See that?
See, when I put color, you can see this brighter blue color over the countertop.
But if I just select Hue, it keeps that hue, but not the saturation.
It's a subtle effect, but it definitely helps.
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