drop shadow

[songbird]

Sometimes when I try to make a drop shadow I get a thin white line between the shadow and the person or the edge of the person is kind of jagged. How can I fix this?

 

[ibclare]

I can only guess as I have never had this problem. Perhaps you should check and see what your contour is set to. In the drop shadow dialogue box, look under the heading "quality" and you will see the drop down menu. The default is the very first choice called linear. The others will give you different edge/contour effects. As for the jagged edges, I suspect that has to do with the selection itself. Unless you are working with really low resolution images.

 

[songbird]

I looked at it a little closer. My contour is set for the first setting, the two triangles. I see that the white line only happened on the leg area. The leg had a bit of a black line running down it from another really dark shadow that I erased. When I made a new shadow by the leg it left a little of the black line and made a new white line beside it. I guess it had something to do with the black in this case?

 

[dv8_fx]

There has to be leftover artifacts or a very faint , super light grey pixels n that area.

before adding the shadow, go to LAYER>MATTING>DE-FRINGE.... at 1 pixel....



edit... come to think about it, did you apply Remove Black or Remove White matte? Doing that sometimes leaves faint white pixels around the selection image edges.

 

[songbird]

I didn't know about the matting function before this. I tried defringe. It helped slightly, but not all the way. I'm assuming I have to remove the black along the leg for the shadow to work.

 

[dv8_fx]

I see... yes, you have to minimize the black alongside the leg.

Also try increasing the defringe setting.....

 

[songbird]

I tried selecting the leg and going to defringe and it seemed to make the black along the leg bigger. Then I tried to take the black off along the legwith a clone tool which helped some, before I tried to make a drop shadow. There were still other spots around the girl that had extra white lines and things added. I edited them with the clone tool. This had happened to me before, so I don't know if I'm doing something wrong. Sometimes the shadow turns out fine though on some pictures.

 

[dv8_fx]

"remove black with clone tool...." ? You meant "eraser tool", right?

And is the girl on a layer?

 

[songbird]

I guess I really don't know how to use the eraser tool yet. I don't have the girl on a layer. I still have the original copies saved though.

 

[songbird]

Well I guess I did put her on a layer when I used drop shadow.

 

[dv8_fx]

One way we can help you and see if you're doing the right steps if we can see the psd file. Can you upload it if it's OK?

 

[songbird]

OK I'll try to upload a psd of the photo I started with and then one with a drop shadow. The one I tried to do with a drop shadow shows some white lines near the neck and face and near the leg. I tried selecting the image and using defringe on this one just to see what would happen.

ps. I'm assuming I need to shrink the image size of these files a little before I upload them since they are so big?
That is what I did anyway.