Raster Image - Drop Shadow

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Raster Image - Drop Shadow

The Drop Shadow operation is an operation plug-in, which works with raster images and adds a shadow of given color, size, position and density to an image.

rsrc/shadow-circle.png image
Outer shadow was added to the red circle.

Shadow is the silhouette of an image (cropped by an optional image mask) that has been blurred, its transparency was adjusted and the result was optionally moved by given distance from the original position. Floating point numbers may be used to specify the blur radius and the offsets.

rsrc/drop-shadow-operation-config.png image

The Shadow position parameter (added in version 2011.1) has major influence on the behavior of the effect:

  • If it is set to Shadow only, the original image is deleted and only the shadow remains.
  • The Outer shadow is the most common behavior - the shadow is placed under the actual image.
  • The Inner shadow inverts the effect. The shadow is placed over the image, but the shadow source is the exterior.

The shadow operation can be instructed to change the size of the image to ensure that there is enough space for the shadow. This is important for completely opaque images, because the underlying shadow would not be visible otherwise.

It is possible to select the shadow color. If other than black color is used, the shadow effect becomes less a shadow and resembles a glow effect.

Internals

GUID: 179FED75-A48F-4708-AF14-56BFB2A2ADBC

Parameter nameTypeDefaultValueNote
Densityfloat150.0percent
Sizefloat3.0pixels
OffsetXfloat1.0pixels
OffsetYfloat1.0pixels
Typeinteger00=standard
1=egde only
in case of edge only shadow, interiors of semitransparent areas do not cast shadows
Resizeboolfalseif enabled, the canvas will be extended to accommodate the shadow (if the document type support changes to canvas size - for example icons do not)
Blendinginteger00=outer
1=inner
2=shadow only
Colorint0x000000color of the shadow in hexadecimal RGB format
MaskIDstring"IMAGEMASK"state ID holding an image mask

Shortcut: CTRL + D

Recent comments

user icon Anonymous on January 26th 2011

i don't know if its a bug but when you put this shadow effect on a cursor when you drag files it shows a big circle-like shadow, can you help me please?

user icon jose_ygg registered user on January 26th 2011

that happens when you set the created/edited cursors as your cursor scheme

user icon Anonymous on February 6th 2015

how do you make the size of the shadow bigger

user icon Vlasta site administrator on February 6th 2015

Increase the number in the "Shadow size" box.

user icon Anonymous on June 6th 2017

Windows 10. Real World does not appear to handle drop shadows any loger. No longer, is there a "resize image" checkbox. The shadow is not visible. Additioanlly, no longer, is there a way to see 'before' and 'affected' image in the same preview window. Why change all of this? It worked so well before but is now broken. Help!

user icon Vlasta site administrator on June 8th 2017

Windows version should not affect the behavior at all. Are you by chance trying to add shadow to a vector layer?

user icon RIDDLER registered user on April 15th 2021

Drop shadows can be added to cursors in RW Cursor Editor.

user icon Anonymous on November 17th 2021

How do we set the Resize to 'True' so there's room for the drop shadow??

user icon Anonymous on April 1st 2022

Great work on the app, have been using it for years and I absolutely love it.

user icon Anonymous
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