How to apply drop shadows in Gimp

[Treycee Melody]

I am a Gimp user and am trying to apply a drop shadow on am image with a background (such as a wall).  I want to keep the background image.  How do I apply a drop shadow to the "person" to appear more natural?  I have searched and searched the internet for tutorials and most everything takes away the background image.  Please help!  I would like detailed instructions or a video tutorial that I can use.  

 

Thanks,

Treycee Melody 

[Luc Starsider]

I can't really provide a suggestion on your actual question, but I wonder if it's better to ask in the Building and Texturing forum?

- Luc -

[PeterCanessa Oh]

Yes, I think that would be the best place to ask because it really needs a discussion of techniques and software that we can't really go into here. It's not like we can just say 'click this, press that, switch this on' or something.

[Cinnamon Lohner]

You have to use layers.  For example, take a background image and then add text.  That text will be in its own layer.  Now apply the Drop shadow to the text layer and you will have shadowed text on your background.  I suspect your problem is that you are taking snapshots in SL and then trying to spruce up the image in Gimp.  Unfortunately, your snapshot is a single background layer as far as Gimp is concerned and the Drop shadow tool will only apply itself to the edges.    You need to shoot your background and your model as separate images and then combined them in order to do what you describe.

--Cinn

 

[Innula Zenovka]

There's several tutorials on YouTube about how extract models from plain background images (prior to superimposing them one your original image, as Cinnamon suggests).   EG

They use Photoshop in the examples, but the technique looks easy enough to apply to Gimp, I think.