Creating Shadows-HELP!

[drakkenlover]

Okay, does anybody know where I can find a tutorial on making shadows for pictures by using Photoshop?

I'm trying to do this art piece and I don't have a clue on how you would do shadows or lighting or anything.

Can someone please help me?

[nabusan]

Look up cell shading on Deviant Art.

[drakkenlover]

Thanks, nabusan

[ViridianSin]

Yeah, deviant art has a lot of good tutorials for that sort of thing.

Failing that, Just create a new layer on top of the image, set it to "Multiply" And color shade areas with your base colors. It works almost the same as any complicated technique you can find.

[drakkenlover]

Thanks for the tip.

[Sarah]

I'd go into great depth, but I'd confuse you... It's a difficult thing to just 'learn' trust me... But tutorials are usually the best start.

Keep in mind where your TWO sources of light are coming from. Usually, soemthing has more than one source of light...

[nabusan]

I've recently discovered the joys of the 'Fill Path' tool, so I use that for shading on a new layer.

[Slyrr]

For KP style drawings (and cartoons in general) they keep the lighting simple-ish. (It's hard to 'animate' shadows, believin' you me) A handy thing I've learned is to make two layers for shadows. One layer will be the main one, in which you draw shadow shapes on areas of the character's bodies depending on where your sources of light are. Keep it transparent. You can vary the transparency depending on how stark you want the lighting. For daylight scenes, between 15-25% transparent is best. For night scenes, 35-45% works pretty good. Once you've got it looking they way you want, then DUPLICATE the shadow layer. Hide the primary shadow layer and then apply a gaussian blur filter to the duplicate layer to soften it. Adjust the blur so it's not too strong and not too weak. Make this layer more transparent, then unhide the primary shadow layer and readjust the transparencies on both layers so they don't look too dark in combination. You can add additonal layers for HIGHLIGHTS if needed (like if there's a lamp off camera or something). And other layers for the background, any furniture in the background and so on.

It's how I've managed to pull of stuff like this:



The primary source was the setting sun of course, meaning that the figure in the background would have to be mostly in shadow with the light behind him, but with a light 'halo' around his edges, as you often will see when something has a setting sun behind it. The foreground characters' shadows were a little less stark since the light is distributed a bit more evenly....