Simple Floating Shadows in Photoshop

We all know how to use Drop Shadows in Photoshop but what if the object was floating in mid-air and therefore needed a customized shadow to show it's distance from the ground? Creating these kind of hovering shadows is a little trickier but allows more freedom than the Drop Shadow function. Here's how you might do it.

Step 1: After drawing your shape and adding an inner shadow to it via the Blending Options, draw a compressed circle shape with the Ellipitical Marquee Tool on a new layer. This compressed selection should be the width of your solid shape.

Step 2: With the condensed circle selected, go to Edit > Fill and select a colour that's a very dark variation of the colour of your solid object and hit ok.

Step 3: De-select the condensed shape and turn it into a shadow, by selecting Gaussian Blur from the Blur options. Set the blur to around 55 pixels.

Step 4: Next, change the angle of the shadow to suit the rotation of the solid object. To do this, go to Transform > Distort and stretch the middle anchor points 90 degrees upwards.

Step 5: Copy the shadow layer. Place it above the original shadow layer and shrink this to half it's size. Place the copy in the centre of the original to give the middle area a darker appearance. There you have it!

#Shadows #Photoshop #ShapeTool