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Paint Shop Pro Custom
Shadows
Although Paint Shop Pro has a Drop
Shadow feature you really are limited to the style of drop shadow you can
apply with that filter. However, because Paint Shop Pro allows the
creation of vector text and shapes you can create custom drop shadows very
easily. You can make them short or tall, fat or skinny because vectors
always stretch and shape nicely.
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For this tutorial
we will be creating a custom shadow for text. Create a blank
image. For the size of text I am using I created a blank image 590
pixels wide by 175 pixels high. Make sure that "Create as
Vector" is ticked and also that Antialias is checked. You
have the option of creating Standard text which is one solid color
or you can create text with an outline as I have. To create text
with an outline choose a Stroke and Fill color in the Styles
options. |
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As mentioned above,
being able to create vector text allows us the opportunity to
resize our text without losing quality. I stretched the text so it
was a little taller than it's original height. |
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When you create
text as a vector a new layer will appear in your Layer Palette and
is distinguished as a vector layer by the box with handles next to
the layer name. There will also be a plus sign next to the box
with handles that allows you to open the layer and select vector
elements on that layer. |
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Next we'll create
the shadow layer by creating a text layer with Standard text as a
vector. The color of this text can be any color you like. I've
used black for simplicity. Once the text is on the layer, you'll
want to use the Image menu to Flip the text upside down and it
will then look like the image below. |
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Using the Mover
tool line up the text as below. |
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That doesn't look
real impressive so we'll skew the black text a little by selecting
it's layer from the Layer Palette. When the handles show up, hold
down the shift key while mousing over the bottom center handle.
You can now hold down the left mouse button and drag the text left
to right to skew it. |
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Since we don't want
a black shadow we can set the transparency of that layer to soften
our shadow. I have mine shadow layer set to a transparency of 20. |
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The shadow looked a
little too tall to me so I grabbed the bottom center handle and
moved it upward a bit to shorten the shadow. |
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That is all there
is to it. A pretty simple operation for some great custom shadow
effects. Below is and example of the shadow falling behind the
text. The only limit to custom shadows is your imagination. |
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