Dropping Shadows

An excerpt from the upcoming Mastering CorelDRAW 9, available this month.

If we had to pick one aspect of computer- based drawing that has benefited most in the last two years, it would have to be the drop shadow. We remember the bad old days all too well, when creating soft shadows behind objects never looked quite right. Of course, it’s still easy to mess up drop shadows, or use them in the wrong situations, and we will not let that subject go undiscussed in this article. But when you need a clean, soft drop shadow, the interactive tool introduced in DRAW 8 is without peer.

Hard vs. Soft

1. Create the headline and shade it as desired.
2. With it still selected, press the plus key to make a copy right on top of itself.
3. Press Tab to switch to the original headline in the back.
4. Fill it black.
5. Use your keyboard arrow keys to nudge down and to the side.

Creating a hard drop shadow
is easy with a bit of clever keystroking.

We think this is perfectly fine; tell the purists to go jump in the lake.

However, we’re not so satisfied with the next one. By moving the headline into the photo, we are implicitly hovering it over the image of the lake (Lake Shasta in California, for anyone who cares), and now the shadow does not pass muster. If we are trying to create the effect of a raised headline, then the shadow cast by the letters would not be a hard shadow, but a soft one. It would show dispersion of light and areas of transparency. It would have to be a real shadow.

The effect of placing letters atop a photo requires a more realistic shadow than the simple hard drop shadow.

Shadows and Vectors Don’t Mix

So DRAW users resorted to trickery with Blend and Contour, but the results were usually unacceptable. The figure below shows our best effort to create a soft shadow behind the headline, using Contour. The results aren’t too bad on the bottom of the third line of type, but above that, where the sky is darker, the lighter shade is too light. Were we to compensate up top, the lower part would be off. Were we to try to create a gradient contour, we would have to separate each line of type, it would be very time-consuming, and we would probably give up and redesign the piece.

Not good enough! Using vector-based tools to create soft shadows delivers unsatisfactory results.

This is clearly outside of the domain of vector tools, even with DRAW’s recent capability of applying transparency to objects. Vector objects are sharp, clean, and well-defined—that is their undying virtue. But shadows are supposed to be fuzzy, dull, and somewhat undefined. Therein lies the dilemma.

Shadows and Bitmaps Are Made for Each Other

A realistic soft shadow has Bitmap written all over it. Pixels must fade to the colors underneath, and the transition must be gradual and somewhat diffuse. Vector objects are simply not capable of such effects without undo toil on your part.

As a result, one of the truly cool discoveries back in DRAW 7 was when we all learned that we could convert an object to a bitmap and apply a blur to it. It was a bit unwieldy and it had its share of bugs, but we made to it work. This was the beginning of a new era for DRAW.

Enter the Interactive Drop Shadow

Watch how easily and how credibly we can create a soft shadow to the headline above the photo. To follow along, import any photo into DRAW and type a string of artistic text on top of it. Try to find a photo that has a varying background, like the sky in our photo. Then do this:

1. Select the text.
2. Activate the Interactive Drop Shadow tool (the last icon on the Interactive Tool flyout on the toolbox).
3. Place your cursor inside the lettering and drag out in whatever direction you want to cast the shadow. DRAW will creates an outline to show you where the shadow would will go, were when you to release the mouse then.

   

4. Release the mouse.

Now DRAW will think for a while. Internally, it is creating a copy of the text, converting it to a bitmap, and applying a transparent blur to the bitmap. With a simple rectangle, this won’t take more than five seconds, but for a three-deck headline, you might be watching it churn away for 30 seconds or more. The result is worth it, though.

While we’re not done with this shadow, notice that it already is satisfying the crucial requirements of a realistic shadow:

It goes from more opaque directly below the letters to more transparent away from the letters.

And Its transparency is true, irrespective of the color beneath it. Lighter in the lower sky, and darker in the top part of the sky.

Once around Drop Shadow

Direction: This variable is referred to as the Drop Shadow Offset on the Pproperty bar, but you’ll probably never use those value boxes to adjust this setting. You’ll just grab the control handle and move it, as we did to create the shadow initially.

Opacity: This setting determines how translucent to make the drop shadow, with lower numbers being more transparent and higher numbers being more transparent. The graphic below shows the simple effects of this control; a setting of 15 is much fainter than a setting of 76. Note the on-screen slider control—you can adjust opacity from the Pproperty bar or from this slider.

You determine how strong the light source is by adjusting the opacity: less opacity (top) or more opacity (bottom).

Feathering: Corel does not do a good job in defining this setting very well—think of it as the distance between the object being shadowed and the surface below it. With lower numbers—i.e., with less feathering—the shadow is more defined and less diffuse.

For realism, you need to make sure that the feathering and the direction are set in concert. If the text were just barely off the surface, you would have very little feathering, and also very little offset. If you set Feathering to 2 and then set a large offset, the effect would not be credible. We often set Feathering to 5, as shown here.

You can also set the Feathering Direction and the Feathering Edges, two more deficiently explained controls. These are conceptually similar to the direction of a contour and the handling of corners of an outline; adjust them for yourself to see how they operate. Feathering Edges is only active if you set Direction to something other than its default, and odds are you’ll rarely move Direction off of the default of Average.

Drop Shadow Perspective Type

And here is a golfer getting one last hole in before the sun sets, compliments of a bottom-casting shadow.

The final three controls, Angle, Fade, and Stretch, all affect the perspective. In the graphic above, we set a high Fade value.

You can create perspective shadows initially if you pay attention to where you first click on the control object. Click in the middle and drag to get a flat perspecitve; click on the left and drag to get a left perspective shadow; click on the bottom and drag for a bottom shadow, etc.

Drop Shadow Color: You can determine the color of the shadow—or to be more precise, the color of the light shining on the object—by working the color drop-down on the Pproperty bar, or by dragging and dropping colors from the on-screen palette to the solid control handle (the one furthest from the control object).

Caveat Flashlight: Don’t Get Carried Away!

Now that soft drop shadows are so easy to create, we fear the worst. We fear that we’ll see them showing up all over the place, even when they are completely uncalled for. To that end, we recite the battle cry of all amateur designers:

Do not use an effect just because you learned how.

Remember, a soft drop shadow implies that an object is raised off of the surface. This has implications…

What if only one object of a drawing is raised off the surface, but others aren’t? Would that look weird?

And what if you decide for the sake of consistency to apply a shadow to all objects? Wouldn’t that look ridiculous?

Separation Anxiety

There are two primary reasons to consider separating a drop shadow.

To Move the Shadow Independently: Perspective shadows are tricky, as DRAW must anchor the shadow to one part of the object (top, bottom, left, or right). And sometimes the anchor point is arbitrary, as in the case of a bottom shadow of text that has descenders. Where do you anchor the text—at the baseline or at the descender??

If you disagree with DRAW’s decision, you will need to nudge the shadow manually, requiring that you first separate it.

To Ensure Proper Imaging: This might be the most important piece of advice of all with reference to drop shadows. DRAW’s interactive effects are complicated, sometimes too much so for some output devices. You can tame a drop shadow by converting it to a static bitmap: that way, all you are asking of your output device is that it print pixels.

You could select the entire drop shadow group and convert it to a bitmap, but then you surrender all future editing of the control object. Better to separate the shadow from the control object. Then you have your shadow as a transparent bitmap, and your control object still in its native form.

In the unlikely event that your output device still chokes, the next thing to point the finger of suspicion at would be the transparent bitmap effect of the drop shadow. To overcome that, you would have to select the bitmap, and any object that is behind it, and convert it/them to a static bitmap image (Bitmap | Convert to Bitmap).

If your service bureau still can’t output your image, it’s time to find another service bureau…

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This is an excerpt from Rick Altman’s upcoming book from SYBEX Inc., Mastering CorelDRAW 9 (ISBN 0-7821-2520-4), available June 1999. For more information or to place an order, visit our LEARNING page.

Copyright 1999, All rights reserved. R. Altman & Associates. Have an opinion? Share it with the Corel community at the CorelWORLD Forum. Lots of participation and regular visitors, so please join in...

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