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Found a simple layer trick that fixed my shadow rendering issues
I kept struggling with harsh shadows looking fake in my portrait work. On a whim I tried duplicating my shadow layer, setting it to multiply at 30% opacity, and blurring it by 8 pixels. Here in the Digital Art Showcase community, has anyone else found a layering method that made shadows click for them?
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valc911mo ago
samk77 said that multiply at 30% is too heavy and honestly theyre so right. I did that exact thing once and my shadow looked like someone spilled ink on the canvas, total disaster. My dumb trick is using a soft brush at 20% opacity on a normal layer and just painting shadows manually, then gaussian blur by like 5 pixels to soften it up. Works great for me because my layer management is a mess and I usually forget which blend mode I used anyway.
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samk771mo ago
Actually the multiply blend mode at 30% is usually way too heavy unless your shadows are super faint. Try setting it to like 8-12% instead, you can always stack another copy if it needs more punch. That 8px blur is solid though, keeps things soft but still readable.
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Grab a layer with your drop shadow and just slide that opacity down to like 10% or so, that's usually where it starts looking natural. I used to always go too heavy too, kept wondering why my stuff looked muddy. The blur radius matters just as much as the opacity though, if your source image is high res you might need to bump that blur up to 12 or 15 pixels to keep it soft enough. I usually stack two light shadow layers instead of one heavy one, gives you way more control if you need to tweak it later.
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