Custom Shadows

Although Paint Shop Pro has a Drop Shadow feature you really are limited to the style of drop shadow you can apply with that filter. However, because Paint Shop Pro allows the creation of vector text and shapes you can create custom drop shadows very easily. You can make them short or tall, fat or skinny because vectors always stretch and shape nicely.

For this tutorial we will be creating a custom shadow for text. Create a blank image. For the size of text I am using I created a blank image 590 pixels wide by 175 pixels high. Make sure that "Create as Vector" is ticked and also that Antialias is checked. You have the option of creating Standard text which is one solid color or you can create text with an outline as I have. To create text with an outline choose a Stroke and Fill color in the Styles options. 

As mentioned above, being able to create vector text allows us the opportunity to resize our text without losing quality. I stretched the text so it was a little taller than it's original height.

When you create text as a vector a new layer will appear in your Layer Palette and is distinguished as a vector layer by the box with handles next to the layer name. There will also be a plus sign next to the box with handles that allows you to open the layer and select vector elements on that layer.

Next we'll create the shadow layer by creating a text layer with Standard text as a vector. The color of this text can be any color you like. I've used black for simplicity. Once the text is on the layer, you'll want to use the Image menu to Flip the text upside down and it will then look like the image below.

Using the Mover tool line up the text as below.

That doesn't look real impressive so we'll skew the black text a little by selecting it's layer from the Layer Palette. When the handles show up, hold down the shift key while mousing over the bottom center handle. You can now hold down the left mouse button and drag the text left to right to skew it.

Since we don't want a black shadow we can set the transparency of that layer to soften our shadow. I have mine shadow layer set to a transparency of 20.

The shadow looked a little too tall to me so I grabbed the bottom center handle and moved it upward a bit to shorten the shadow.

That is all there is to it. A pretty simple operation for some great custom shadow effects. Below is and example of the shadow falling behind the text. The only limit to custom shadows is your imagination.

Copyright Vikki Olds, All Rights Reserved