From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

856 What’s wrong with this drop shadow?

From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

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856 What’s wrong with this drop shadow?

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- [Instructor] All right, so here we are looking at that layered screen rendering that my wife put together for that episode of Deke's Techniques that came out back in January of this year. That shows off the Trim View command inside of Illustrator. All right, so when we actually post the graphic, it wouldn't be nearly this wide. We'd be zoomed in, so we crop in on this detail right here, let's say. And so let's just take a moment to see how this thing is put together. Even though all the elements come from Illustrator, they're assembled inside Photoshop, because after all, this is a pixel level screen rending. And so here at the bottom, if I Alt or Option+click on the eye in front of all objects, that is the screenshot that was compiled inside Illustrator. This black boundary right here represents the art board. The red boundary is the bleed. Then in front of that we have this menu floating all by itself. Without the menu bar, by the way, because otherwise the menu bar would cast a shadow, and that just ends up looking weird. Then we've got this text layer, which is the text that we saw just a moment ago in the wide view, so don't need to worry about that. And then we have this vector-based shape layer in the shape of an arrow. And this is something I drew years ago, because it allows us to scale that arrow to any size we like. So in other words, what we have is a very versatile screen rendering. But let's take a closer look at the menu, because after all, that's the topic of this particular movie. So I'll go ahead and turn off the layer effects for a moment, and I'll Shift+click on that layer mask to turn it off. And so as you can see here, we've got this menu all by itself. And then we've got this stroke effect right here. So we have a little bit of an outline around the menu. And then next we have a drop shadow, which is consistent with the way the menu actually looks, inside of Illustrator. Now at this point, my wife decided that we only needed to see the top of the View menu right here, because that's the portion of the menu that contains the Trim View command. And so she wanted to mask the rest of the menu away, which is why she added this gradient layer mask, which I can reapply by Shift+clicking on its thumbnail, once again here inside the Layers panel. And so we have this very nice drop off. So looks very simple, right? What in the world could go wrong? Well, let me show you. I'll go ahead and turn that menu off. And I'll make sure it's selected, so that when I replace the menu, it comes in in the right location. All right, so I'll switch over to the screenshot of the menu right here. And so as you can see, it's very high resolution. And that's because it was captured on a high DPI retina display, which are pretty common where Macintosh computers are concerned any more. And now if I zoom out, by pressing Control+zero, or Command+zero on the Mac, you can see that it already has a layer mask assigned to it. And just so you can see what this layer mask looks like, I'll Alt or Option+click on it. And I know, I get the irony, by the way, that even though we're working with a Macintosh screen graphic right here that has a bunch of Macintosh keyboard equivalents, I keep talking in PC terms, because I happen to be working on a PC. How confusing is that? So anyway, I'm going to Alt+click or Option+click on this layer mask thumbnail, in order to view it independently of the image. And you can see, it is just a gradient. So it starts white at the top, and then it ends black at the bottom. And you can draw such a thing using the gradient tool, so no biggie where that's concerned. I'll just go ahead and click on the image thumbnail right there in order to bring back that masked graphic. And now I'll copy the image and the mask together by going up to the Edit menu and choosing the Copy command. Or you can just press Control+C here on the PC, or Command+C on the Mac. All right, now I'll go ahead and switch back to this guy, and I will return to the Edit menu, and I'll choose the Paste command, or you can press Control+V or Command+V on a Mac. And this assumes, by the way, that you're working in a recent version of Photoshop. All right, now I want to move it into a better location. So, just go ahead and switch to the Move tool, which you can get by pressing the V key. And I'll just go ahead and drag that guy, along with its layer mask. And the reason the layer mask is moving along with it is because the two are linked together. See that little chain icon? And I'm going to nudge it, actually, a little bit over to the left. The position of the menu, however, does not matter. All right now, let's go ahead and stroke this guy by dropping down to the fx icon at the bottom of the Layers panel, and choosing Stroke. And I'll go ahead and move the Layer Style dialog box over a little bit, so I can keep track of what I'm doing. Obviously, I don't want the color of the stroke to be orange. So I'll go ahead and click on that orange swatch, and I'll just zero out all these values. Set hue to zero degrees, that doesn't really matter, but we definitely want the saturation and brightness values to be 0%. That does matter. At which point, I'll click OK. And I'll set the size value to two pixels, let's say. The opacity is 100% as you can see. The blend mode is set to Hue. How curious is that? I don't know where that's coming from, but that's not what I want. I want Normal, and I want Position to be Outside. At which point, I'm going to get this hideous effect right here. Now, already some of you know what the problem is, but I'm going to keep the rest of you in suspense. But I'm telling those of you who know what this problem is, that's just one of two problems with this effect. All right, so with that cryptic advice in mind, I'm going to go ahead and turn on the Drop Shadow right here, which doesn't want to be anything like this either. I'll click on the color swatch, and I'll go ahead and zero out the saturation and brightness values so that we have a black drop shadow, which is the way things look, on the Mac at least these days. And so, I'll take the opacity value down to 50%, an angle of 135 degrees is just fine. And I'm looking for a distance value of 20 pixels, a spread of zero is fine. And I'll take the size value up to 40 pixels. So I had those guys backward for some reason. At which point, you can see that we sill have this very problematic effect. Well, again, as some of you have already guessed, the solution here is to click on Blending Options, over here in the left-hand list. And notice this checkbox right here, Layer Mask Hides Effects. By default, it's not on. And so as a result, we're actually applying the stroke across the layer mask, which is why we're getting this big fade right here. And we're also making a mess of the drop shadow. And so what I want to do is mask the effects along with the layer, and so I'll just go ahead and turn that checkbox on, and we end up with a better effect, I guess, but obviously, something's wrong. All right, so I'll go ahead and click OK, 'cause that's all we can do in this dialogue box. And I'll show you that the stroke goes all the way to the bottom, and so does the drop shadow. So in what world is Photoshop obeying my instructions? I'm just going to bring back that dialogue box by double-clicking on this image thumbnail right here. I asked for the layer mask to hide the effects, and it's not. It's not hiding the effects at all. They are quite evident and visible inside that masked area. Well, go ahead and click OK or Cancel, doesn't matter at this point. Here's our problem child, it's the layer mask itself. Notice this, if I Alt or Option+click on that Layer Mask thumbnail, it is only as big as the menu. It needs to be huge, like it is on this next layer down. It needs to take up the entire width of the screen. So it's actually covering up the stroke, which is located outside of the menu, as well as the drop shadow, which is also outside the menu. And so, what you need to do is Alt or Option+click on that Layer Mask thumbnail once again, and even though I have a smile in my voice, because I figured out the solution, this actually took us like 15 minutes to figure out. It's like, "Holy moly, why is Photoshop just not working?" It's like one of those things where you think, "Maybe I should restart the program, "or reset the preferences", or something goofy like that. Or, just notice what's really going on, and that Photoshop is obeying your specific instructions. So now what you need to do is grab the Gradient tool, and then just go ahead and right-click on that Gradient thumbnail on the far left side of the Options bar, and choose Reset Tool. And that's just in case you're working along with me, so you're getting the same results. And then tap the D key, so we have the default foreground and background colors, which because we're working inside of a Layer Mask, are white for the foregrounds and black for the background. And now, notice that we are going to create a white to black gradient. You can see that up here in the Options bar. It's going to be a Linear Gradient, and so forth. And so now, with nothing selected, except of course, the Layer Mask. You want to make sure that's active. Here inside the Layers panel, I'll just go ahead and drag from, let's say, right about here. This gray line down, and I'll press the Shift key as I drag, so I'm constraining the angle of my gradient to exactly vertical, and then I'll release. And that goes ahead and fills the entire Layer Mask with that gradient. And in doing so, actually goes ahead and masks away those layer effects. And so this is before, bad. And this is after, which is to say, quite good. All right, so maybe your version of Photoshop looks different than mine, but assuming that it works the same, that is how you successfully mask layer effects, whether they be Stroke, Drop Shadows, or other so-called Outer Effects, expertly and successfully, here inside Photoshop.

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