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Adobe Photoshop CC - Essentials Training

How to add a drop shadow to text in Photoshop CC

Daniel Walter Scott

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Hi there, it is Drop Shadow time. You can see this text here, this text here, both have Drop Shadows applied. It's not super hard to do, but we're going to look at it. We're going to do it for objects as well, these stars have Drop Shadows. Just turn it back on. It's not going to take us long but also I'm going to throw in some bonus did-you-knows at the end. So hang around, and yes, let's get started. 

To add a Drop Shadow to text or any object just make sure it is selected in your Layers Panel because it's a light gray color. Let's go down to 'fx', and go to 'Drop Shadow'. That's how you have imagined it. So we'll do a couple of little things just to get a little bit clued on, and how it works. So by default it'll remember the last thing you've done, so yours won't look exactly like mine. So Opacity, obviously is just how see through-iness it is. I'm going to lower mine down a little bit. Now in terms of Drop Shadows, it depends, I like mine straight up and down, like 90°. Kind of pokes off the bottom there. 

In terms of Distance, it's how far it's away, give that a play. And the size is, how kind of spread out or dispersed the shadow is. So it really depends. I often just punch in 3 and 3 for these two. That's enough for what I do, it's either 5 and 5, or 3 and 3. That generally gets to the kind of preferred stuff that I like. You might hate that, and you might like a big giant fuzzy one, so do that as well. There's no right or wrong. 

Let's look at two extra things, so let's click on 'OK'. Let's say that I like this, and I want to add it to this layer as well. So I can right-click it, I can go to 'Copy Layer Style'. Find my scottshoes, there it is there. I can right click that and go to 'Paste Style'. I'm going to do it to these two stars as well, so this star here. Can I do them both at the same time? Right click, 'Paste Style'? Oh I can. This bottom one here, the opacity change, so I'm going to lower the opacity again because that's what I liked about it. 

One last thing to talk about when it comes to Shadows. I've got this top star selected, let's say I don't like it going up and down. I liked it on the text but I didn't like it over here. So to edit my Drop Shadow I just double click the word 'Drop Shadow' and move it out of the way, and let's say I want to change the angle. What's going to happen is, this guy here, 'Use Global Light', let's say I move it to the other side here. It looks great, but did you notice it changed over here? You might have not. Let's see it all changed. It even changed in this here, under the Bevel and Emboss, which we did earlier. 

Watch, when I move it around, can you see, they all change, that's the use of Global Light. Just means that every Layer Style in this whole document will be affected with the Light Angle. That's kind of cool, because you want them all to be hitting the same angles but now because we didn't, I wanted to be 90 for them all but I'm going to, for this one particular star, that I've got selected, I'm going to turn off that. 

Watch now, just that one star is working, and adjusting the way I want. I'm not going to go through all the settings. You can play around with the contours and the noise. You can play with the Spread, I never do those, so we're going to leave it for the moment, and let you experiment, but that my friends is how to add Drop Shadows. All right, next video.