Add a Drop Shadow to a PNG

offset · blur · colour · opacity · canvas auto-expanded · batch

Give a cut-out subject or a logo a soft shadow so it lifts off the page. The shadow follows the shape's real silhouette — its alpha channel — not a rectangle, and the canvas grows automatically so nothing gets clipped at the edges.

It needs transparency to work

The shadow is generated from the image's alpha channel. Feed it a photo with no transparency — a plain rectangular JPG or a flattened PNG — and the silhouette is the whole rectangle, so you get a shadow behind a box. Sometimes that's exactly what you want for a card or a screenshot. If you meant to shadow a cut-out subject, the subject needs to be cut out first: Background can remove a near-solid colour, and Auto-trim tightens the transparent border afterwards.

Settings that look right

Shadows read as believable when they're consistent about where the light is. Pick one direction and keep it: positive Y with a small positive X — light from the upper left — is the convention almost every interface uses, which is why it looks unremarkable and therefore correct.

Blur should scale with distance. A tight 4 px offset with 4 px blur reads as an object resting on the surface; 30 px offset with 40 px blur reads as floating well above it. An offset much larger than the blur gives a hard-edged shadow that looks like a second copy of the object, which is a deliberate poster effect rather than realism.

Opacity around 35–50% is right for most work. Pure black at 100% is almost always too heavy — real shadows pick up colour from their surroundings, so tinting the shadow toward the background colour (a deep blue over a blue page, for instance) looks markedly better than neutral black.

A note on the canvas: it expands by the blur radius plus the offset on each side, so the output is larger than the input. That's necessary — a shadow drawn inside the original bounds would be cut off along the edge it falls toward.

FAQ