When Inner Shadow Just Won’t Do

There are times when an inner shadow looks like thats what I’m after but it doesn’t quite do what I want. That’s when I like to turn to inner glow.

To use inner glow as a shadow is easy, here’s how;

I’ve set up 2 images, an overlapping T and S. All I’ve done here is to take the letters, change them to a path, alter their position then fill them with white. Eventually I’ll be putting these on a white background to give the desired effect.

The image on the left I’ll give a straight Inner Shadow

For the right image I’m going to add an inner glow to make a shadow, this will take a little bit of tweaking;

So here I’ve changed the blend mode from Screen to Multiply, then changed the yellow colour to black and then finally the size I’ve increased just a tiny bit.

You can see there are two differences. The inner shadow follows the light source, as it should, and thus does not flow around the whole image. The other difference is a little more subtle but none the less important. The glow is a little more soft in it’s transition.

Now I’m going to pop back the background, just white and this will make the effect more noticeable. Then I’m going to add a drop shadow to both images with these settings;

Which gives us these images;

This then really shows up the differences between the two methods. The edges are far sharper on the inner shadow image but the inner glow image has some depth.