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Flying Objects and Drop Shadows

Drop shadows are important to create realism in images. Specially when working with a 2d programs like Photoshop, the shadows can give things a sense of depth or 'lift' things off a page. So the key to creating flying cars and other floating objects is making a realistic drop shadow.

Part 1. Choose your images.

You will need two things, the first is a car or another object that you want to levitate, and the second a background picture. I am going to assume that you have already extracted the car / object from its previous background.

Here are the images that I used.

• Background
• Car

Part 2. Basic Drop shadow. Make it Fly

1. Duplicate the car layer (right click, choose duplicate layer), name the new layer shadow.
2. Move the shadow layer below the original layer in the layers panel.
3. Choose the magic wand tool and click somewhere outside the car so that you select everything but the car itself
4. Goto Select->Inverse or Press Ctrl+Shift+I to invert the selection, so now the car itself is selected.
5. Use the paint brush tool with a large brush to fill in the selection with black.
6. Lower the opacity of the shadow layer in the layers panel, I used 50%, experiment to see what works best for you.
7. Go To Edit->Transform->Distort to modify the shadow of the car, till the shadow looks somewhat realistic.

We have liftoff, although the shadow and the overall effect don't look too realistic.

Part 3. Shadow Texture.

The image from part two doesn't' look real because in real life surfaces like grass, tend to distort shadows.

1. Turn off the visibility of all the layers except for the background
2. Save the image as a .psd file
3. From the layers panel select the shadow layer
4. Go to Filter->Distort->Displace, press ok, and then for the displacement map choose the image you saved in step 1

If your image gets messed up, try changing the horizontal and vertical scales for the displacement values

Now that the car appears to be flying, you can add a slight motion blur as well as other finishing touches.

Finished image.

I have quickly added some metallic jets to the side. You ofcorse can add whatever you want to add to finish off your hovering object.

The same technique can also be used for other objects

The background photograph used in this tutorial was enhanced using Photoshop's levels (see the Use Photoshop Levels to fix Images Tutorial)