Summary: Make your standard Photoshop drop shadows go from fake to photo realistic by learning how to map them to the natural textures and depths in your image with displacement maps.

Written by Steve Patterson
Exclusively for Photoshop Essentials.com.

Part of our complete collection of Photo Effects tutorials.

Let's face it, Photoshop's built-in drop shadow effect has it's limitations. It's fine for basic shadow effects, like making text appear to be raised slightly off the background on a web page, but if you're after something more photo realistic, the drop shadow on its own doesn't cut it. With a little help though, we can turn those plain, uninteresting drop shadows into something much more realistic looking by "mapping" our shadows onto the image using what's called a displacement map. Displacement maps are what the pros use to add realism to images, but don't let that scare you away. You don't need to be a pro to use them. In fact, they're really quite simple.

As we'll see in this Photoshop tutorial, a displacement map is really nothing more than a separate, black and white version of your image which Photoshop uses to figure out how to reshape your shadows so that they appear to be following the natural textures and depths of the background behind them, just like what a real shadow would do. Think of a displacement map as Photoshop moving pixels from "dis place to dis place". If that sort of makes sense to you, great! If not, don't worry, it will by the time we're done this tutorial.

Here's my original image, a simple photo of some water:

I'm going to be adding some type over it and then adding a drop shadow to the type. Normally, I'd get something that looks like this:

Not very realistic at all. The drop shadow appears to be following the shapes of the waves below it somewhat, but that's only because the opacity of the drop shadow is set to its default of 75%, so some of the waves are showing through it. The lowered opacity helps a little, but it's definitely not the best we could do. For the most part, the shadows look flat.

Thanks to the power of Photoshop and displacement maps, though, I can easily turn that simplistic drop shadow into something more like this:

That looks a whole lot better, and creating that "mapped" shadow effect is what we'll be doing in this tutorial.

Let's get started!