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Shadow - white instead of black - Printable Version

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Shadow - white instead of black - aztec11us - 04-18-2017

hi all!

One of my first GIMP tutorials is making a floating word - just a word with a simple 'shadow" giving the illusion of the word floating above its background

The page is this one :
https://www.gimp.org/tutorials/Floating_Logo/


In that tutorial, the end result is a word (with a special texture) and a black "shadow" cast against the gree-ish background

Tutorial is easy enough to do, but i tried creating a white shadow.


So, at the beggining, instead of black background + white writing, i did the opposite: white background and black writing.

Needless to say, despite following exactly same steps, results varied wildly compared to the site:
1) at the point where they talk about "layer -> Anchor Layer", instead of obtaining white background with plasma texture writing, i get plasma background and black writing (!!!)
2) lower on the page, at the point where they say "Creating a drop shadow", there is green background and plasma textured text ....but in my case, i get plasma background!

So, despite following same steps, the results vary wildly.

How EXACTLY do i make it so the shadow cast is white instead of black ? (or any other color)

Please, use GIMP and tell me exactly what i need to do.

Thanks


RE: Shadow - white instead of black - Ofnuts - 04-18-2017

Can you make a screen shot of your layer list so that we can compare it to the one in the tutorial?

White shadow will look like dirty snow. How about a bit of motion blur instead:

[attachment=477]


RE: Shadow - white instead of black - rich2005 - 04-19-2017

(04-18-2017, 06:48 PM)aztec11us Wrote: How EXACTLY do i make it so the shadow cast is white instead of black ?  (or any other color)

As tutorials go, that is a good example. It uses standard Gimp tools, introduces bump-mapping, layer-masks and use of layers.

[attachment=480]
For variations.

1. The newbackground layer can be whatever you want in the way of colour, pattern, some other image.

2. For the drop shadow, I think there is a step missing. For a white shadow, obviously no need to invert the colours.
What you do need to do is remove the background using Colors ->  Color To Alpha and in that dialogue change the default white to black.

I think you will need to gaussian blur that shadow layer (2) a bit more but that is personal preference.

Changing the colour of the shadow? Several ways, one is use the alpha lock see: https://docs.gimp.org/en/gimp-dialogs-structure.html enable that, paint over the drop shadow, toggle the alpha lock back off.

A bit more about shadows here: 
http://www.gimp-forum.net/Thread-Shadows-and-drop-shadows?pid=739#pid739