#Indesign drop shadow how to#
You’ll also gain an understanding of the various options associated with creating drop shadows in InDesign and how to set those options to ensure your drop shadows not only look good onscreen but print and export flawlessly, too.įigure 2: The same page layout without drop shadows lacks depth and visual appeal.ĭrop shadows are only applicable to text when their text frames are selected with the Selection tool, which means all the text in the selected frames is affected. You’ll soon see what a difference a few drop shadows can make to your page layouts. In this article, you’ll learn how create drop shadows in InDesign 2.0 to enhance the look of your pages, as we’ve done to the page shown in figure 1. Is it true? Can you really create great-looking drop shadows directly in InDesign? The answer is a resounding “Yes!” and we’ll show you how. Then, on that aforementioned fateful day, InDesign 2.0 was released and, with it, came the ability to create professional-looking drop shadows without ever leaving your page layout document. And if you were placing the drop shadow on top of anything other than a white background, you also had to make the background in the Photoshop file the same color as the background in the InDesign document to prevent unsightly white areas between the shadow and the clipping path. If you wanted text to wrap around the shadow’s contour, you also had to create a clipping path - a process that usually resulted in part of the shadow being cut off. You had to create the effect in Adobe Photoshop and then import the file into your Adobe InDesigndocument, creating yet another link to manage.
Prior to January 21, 2002, it was a fairly tedious task to add a drop shadow to an object in a page layout document.