Here, in this Photoshop tutorial you will learn how to drop a shadow design in an object/picture. The art of effective photography is making excellent use of your surroundings. Shadows cast by relatively simple nearby objects can greatly enhance your images, adding moody atmospheric lighting and suspenseful themes. This technique is tremendously simple and, best of all if you are well versed with the basic operations in Adobe® Photoshop.
Open up an image in Photoshop of any size and/or format. If you have a darkly-colored source image you may want to spend a few minutes modifying with the contrast/brightness or levels to improve the overall color clarity and give it the appearance of being taken in sunlight. After all, it will look more than a little odd to have a strong shadow in an overcast scene.
Open up an image containing the object you intend to use as a shadow. There is no need for this source image to be wonderfully detailed, but it must have a resolution similar to your other image, and have good color separation.
Now all you have to do is form a new selection around the object of your choice that excludes it from the background. Use Select --> Color Range with the Select list box. Once you have formed a selection around your object you need to save it and then export it to your first image. Navigate over to the channels palette without losing your selection and click on the 'Make new channel from selection' button at the bottom of the palette to form a new alpha mask. When you have done this, click and drag the alpha mask from your object image over to your source image to copy it over.
You will now have a new alpha channel in your first image. Back in the layers palette, create a new layer called Shadow, make it active in the layers palette, Edit --> Fill with 50% grey, and deselect. Change the layer blending mode to multiply and the opacity to 75% to give yourself a shadow.
Hide your Shadow layer and save your document. It does not matter what you call it or where you place the .PSD file, but the shadow layer MUST be hidden. When done, make your Shadow layer visible once more and ensure it is selected in the layers palette. Run the Filter --> Distort --> Displace filter with the settings as shown on the left.
With solid white selected as your foreground color and your Shadows layer active in your layers palette, select Layer > Layer Effects --> Gradient Overlay from the main menu. Duplicate the settings in the image opposite and press OK.
Thus, the new image will be created where the shadow of the second is imposed on the first, thus dropping the shadows.
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