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Realistic 3D Shadows

Photoshop Tutorial

Summary:
Often you will have an object that has a white limbo background, but no shadow. In this tutorial, we'll walk through the steps required to add a realistic shadow to any object or item in a photograph.

Step-By-Step Instructions:
1. Open the image you want to apply the effect.

2. Now we need to extract our plant from the white background. Use Lasso or Magic Wand tool of your choice to select your object. Since my image is pretty clear and has good contrast settings, I'm using the magic wand. Delete the background and now you should have a nice clean image:

3. Go to Layers palette and create new layer. Name it "background", fill it up with white color and drag it underneath your plant's layer.

4. We need to free up some space for our shadow, so we'll move the plant more to the right:

5. Make sure your plant layer is selected and press Ctrl+J to duplicate the layer. This will be the layer we'll use to create our shadow, so why don't we name it "shadow" as well. Drag it underneath plant layer.

6. Time to have fun!!! Make sure that layer "shadow" is selected and press Ctrl+T to call free transformation tool (you'll see the bounding box appear)

7. Press and hold Ctrl button and drag top left corner until your plant "lays down" at about 45 degrees angle.

8. Press Enter to set the effect. You can experiment with your shadows angle as you get better - different angles can make your effect look absolutely unique from our tutorial!

9. Go to Layers palette and double click on the layer "shadow" to call the layer's properties window. Go to "Gradient Overlay" and use the settings as shown on the image below (you can experiment with these setting as well to create different effect):

10. Ok the properties dialog and you now have great looking 3d shadowed image! As a last step you can drop the opacity down in your layers palette to make shadow more transparent (I used the opacity of 75%). We are now done!