2 September 2007 - Posted in Uncategorized
Creating a drop shadow with The Gimp
Creating shadows in Gimp is extremely easy to do but many people are not aware of how it is done, so I created this simple tutorial to show you how to do it. Adding a drop shadow really brings your images to stand out and gives a very professional finish.
- Firstly open the image or select the layer that you would like to add the drop shadow to.
- Now go to Script-Fu and select Drop Shadow from the Shadow menu.
- A window similar to this will show
- There are a number of options available. Firstly Offset X and Offset Y, this tells the shadow where abouts it must start so for example if I tell it to offset X 20 and offset Y 10, it will start creating the shadow 20 pixels from the left of the image and 10 pixels from the top. By setting these to zero (0), it will not offset the shadow which means it creates a shadow similar to the one shown on the screenshot in step 3.
- Next is blur radius, by changing this, you are changing how big the shadow should be, so for example 15 makes the shadow width 15 pixels. The bigger the blur radius the more shadow you will have.
- You can then choose a color by clicking the color button, black is default, but say for example your image background is dark gray then you wont really want a black shadow because it wont be effective, so you can change it to any color you wish.
- The final main property is the opacity setting, by default this is 80% which works for most things, but changing this increases/decreases the transparency of the shadow so you can add more of a shadow effect or less of an effect.
- Once you have set your preferences, simply click the OK button and it will create your shadow on a new layer. By adding it to another layer it means that you can move the shadow around by moving the layer.
So there you have it, a simple tutorial on creating a drop shadow. If it helps then the image you see below was created with an Offset X of 8, Offset Y of 8 and a blur radius of 15, the color used was black and the opacity is set to 50%:
Simon North
