Tip of the Week: Creating a Ghostly Effect with a Drop Shadow Trick
This InDesign tip on how to create a ghostly effect was sent to Tip of the Week email subscribers on October 13, 2016.
Sign up now and every week you’ll get a new tip, keyboard shortcut, and roundups of new articles, plus exclusive deals sent right to your Inbox!
Just scroll down to the bottom of this page, enter your email address, and click Go! We’ll take care of the rest. Now, on with the tip!
In last week’s tip we saw how to customize vector Halloween stock art with some glows and gradients. This week, we continue the Halloween theme with how to achieve a ghostly effect, using an obscure drop shadow trick.
We start with a vector ghost shape.
It’s nice but personally, I’ve never seen ectoplasm with crisp vector edges like that.
So if we were in Photoshop, we’d probably reach for the blur commands. But InDesign has no blur commands, so we turn to the next best thing that will soften the edges of an object: the Drop Shadow command. It works much better than a basic feather, and it’s perfect for creating a ghostly look.
Apply a Drop Shadow effect, and in the dialog box, change the color of the drop shadow to white, set the Blending Mode to Screen. Set the Opacity to 100%, and the Distance to zero. The Size of the drop shadow will set the amount of blur. Most importantly: deselect Object Knocks Out Shadow. Click OK.
Now to hide the original object and fully reveal the drop shadow, change the fill of the object to black. Then set the blending mode applied to the object to Screen.
Setting a black object to the Screen mode makes it disappear, and all that’s left is the ghostly effect, which you can tweak by going back to the Drop Shadow dialog box and playing with the settings.
The same trick works on live text for creating all kinds of smudgy, misty, smoky effects.
And you can use it on top of other page items, including photos.
I really find your articles very useful. But if you created a video for these articles, it will be more useful. Thanks anyway.
I really enjoy this site…keep the relevancy coming. Thx!
Thanks mate for your great Ghost effect ideas, Really Loved this post ..