How to do ‘Shadow Masking’ in Photoshop

In this tutorial, i will try to show you how to do ‘shadow masking’ in Photoshop. I hope this is going to be a helpful tutorial to have for the Photoshop learners both for the beginners and the advanced learners.

We are going to do a shadow masking of an image that is of a shoe. At first, we need to make a path of the desired image that of our choice. After doing the path, we need to make the path selection. Then we need to go to the layer option and make a new layer. We can click Ctrl + J to do that as that is a shortcut of creating a new layer. After that, go to ‘channel’ and select the blue channel. We generally prefer blue for shadow masking because it gives you a much more clearer and deeper shadow of an image. Make a copy of the blue channel. It will name as a blue copy channel. Now, select lasso tool from the toolbar and select the shadow that exists in the image. For setting the background as white, we need to click Ctrl + Shift + I. Press Ctrl + Del and it will bring a white background.

Photo Courtesy – https://grabcad.com/

To get rid of the invoice, press Ctrl + D. Now, to make some adjustments, we need to click Ctrl + L. When you select the shadow, it is obvious that some background color may get there along with the shadow. It will help you to get the actual shadow of an image. We need to reduce it and it will get you the actual shadow of an image. Now, select the blue copy once again. To get rid of the invoice second time, press Ctrl +Shift + I. Go back to the layer option and copy the background of  the image. make another layer by clicking Ctrl + J. It will name it as a layer 2. We need to color the background copy and grey is possibly the best color for that. Press Alt + Del to bring the background color. Layer 2 is the main here. So, copy this layer to make the shadow look good. Twice is good for this. Press Ctrl + E to move all the layer starting the name with layer 2 in one category. Close the eye of the background to see the result and match it with your own.