Gimp Series: How to make drop shadows
This will be the first in many Gimp tutorials for TuxTraining.com. Gimp is the GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a freely distributed piece of software for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring. It works on many operating systems, in many languages. Most distributions come with it preinstalled and if it is not, it’s in the repo’s of your distribution.
In this tutorial we’re going to learn how to do drop shadows for an image. First we’ll start with a base image that I’ll provide. It’s a png with a transparent background. This should work on any shape or image you have already though. Go ahead and download this picture and open it in Gimp.
First thing we need to do is add a new layer with transparency.
So now our layers window looks like this:
Next, you will need to duplicate the Background layer. Select your Background layer in the layers dialog, then right click on it and select “Duplicate Layer”. The new layer should now be active. Now check the “Keep Transparency” checkbox. The layers dialog should look like this:
With the duplicate layer still active, press Ctrl+A to select the entire image. Now select the bucket tool and open the bucket fill options dialog. In the “Affected Area” section, make sure “Fill Similiar Colors” is selected and uncheck Fill Transparent Areas. Move the thresh hold to 255.0. Before you use the bucket tool, the bucket fill options should look like this:
Go back to the image and click anywhere. The shape on the duplicate layer should now be filled with black:
Uncheck the “Keep Transparency” checkbox on the layers dialog, and blur the entire layer by Right-Clicking, and choosing Filters->Blur->Gaussian Blur (IIR). A setting of 12×12 should be sufficient. I repeated the blur step four times, but do whatever looks right for your image. Now you’re image should look like below:
Move the shadow layer behind the shape layer by using the down arrow in the layers dialog. Select the shadow layer, and then select the Move tool. Select the image and move the shadow layer down and right slightly. I used the arrow keys and moved the shadow down and right by 10 pixels each, in the following screenshot:
Either add a new, white layer behind the shadow layer, or you can fill the what we have called the New Layer with white using the fill tool. Then we want to move the New Layer to the Bottom on the Layers window.Either way, it should come out looking something like this:
Lastly we do a “Save As”, I typically save it as a png and merge all layers. Below should be our finished product:
And we’re all done.
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