Photo Realistic Drop Shadows in Photoshop

Step 2: Add A Drop Shadow To The Text

With the type layer selected, click on the Add Layer Style icon at the bottom of the Layers palette:

Select Drop Shadow from the list of layer styles that appears:

This will bring up the Layer Style dialog box showing us the Drop Shadow options:

I'm going to leave the Opacity set to its default of 75% and the Angle set to 120 degrees. The only option I'm going to change is Distance, which I'll set to 20 pixels, as shown above. When you're done, click OK to exit out of the options box.

Here's my image with the drop shadow applied:

Definitely not what you'd call realistic. Of course, I can't remember the last time I saw text hovering over water in real life, but if I did see it, I'm sure the shadow wouldn't look this fake. Fortunately, fixing that problem is what this tutorial is all about. We're going to be creating our displacement map next.