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5 min tutorial on how to Create a shadow in Canva round element | difficulty – easy

Hello everyone and welcome back to a Gimp Tutorial, actually to be totally fair this is a joint venture Gimp / Canva as we are going to use Gimp to create a round shadow element that we can then use in Canva to give an extra dimension to the flat shapes. As you might be aware by now, canva only offers a ¨drop shadow” for images but not for SVG elements like the square, ellipse and so on.

If you don have Gimp, no problem, it is free and you can download it here. Gimp is very similar to photoshop or any other image editing software for some basic usage, so you will find all the tools you are normally using with other image editing software and this should allow you to easily find your way of doing things.

Now, for today, in the first part of this mini tutorial, I am just going to do the following on Gimp:

Give an extra dimension to your Canva elements – part 1

STEP 1 – Create a new canvas, square in size should be fine. I will apply a black background to it as this will become our shadow

STEP 2 – Now I am going to add an alpha channel to the layer so that we can have our transparency working out fine for later.

STEP 3 – Great, we have everything we need in pace. Right now we just need to grab the ellipse tool and size our circle. If you want to make it an exact circle hold the buttons ctrl+shift while dragging your circle. Once you have done it position it right in the center of the canvas and remember to leave some room for the transparent rim. If your circle is too close to the edges of the canvas it will not have smooth edges but it will be rather sharp and ¨squarish¨.

STEP 4 – Now that we have the circle in place from the top menu click on select >> feather and give it a value of 85 (my canvas is 1080px x 1080px). The feather tool will make the edges very smooth, which exactly what we want for our shadow.

STEP 5 –

Fantastic, we are getting there. Basically we only need to get rid of the part outside the circle. To do so, we need to “invert” the layer as if we just press delete or ctl+x right now, we would actually get rid of the inner circle and keep the outer space. So, from the top menu we hit back select >> invert (you can also use the keyboard shortcut ctrl+i).

That is it! we have just told Gimp to select the part outside the circle and not the inner part. Now the last thing we need to do is to press delete (ctrl+x) and you will have your shadow ready.

Once you have done so, you can click ctrl+shift+a so that you de-select your selection. Finally, if you really want you can crop any additional empty space so that you make your image smaller and neat. But carefully doing so, you don want to cut off parts of the transparent rim. So rather than just using the manual select tool use the auto feature that will calculate and aonly crop parts of the images that are empty. So, again, this is optional, but if you are like me, and every byte extra is not welcome on my server, you can go ahead in the top menu and hit image >> crop to content. Now is done!

At this point we have finished with gimp. You can now export the image you have created as a .png so that to keep the transparency.
We are now ready to workout the magic on Canva.

Give an extra dimension to your Canva elements – part 2

In Canva we can open whatever size of canvas or open an image, or just create a new document according to what is today the project for which you need to have a shadow on a circle element. In my case I will make a rectangular advertising banner. 

• Once we have the document ready let’s upload the round shade.
• Let’s now select the circle element, make it as big as you need it to be and choose your color, In my case I would do red as it will go well with my background image.
• Now duplicate the red circle and make this copy slightly smaller then the original, then drag it on top of the original
• You can now drag the shadow into the document and place it sandwiched in between the two circles. You can adjust its size so that you have the right amount of shadow, also make it a bit more transparent if it looks too dark.

Voila, its done. You can see that your elements have now acquired a much better dimension and really look like if they were applied one on top of the other and casting the shadow too. You can follow the same process if you want to cast a shadow to a square or rectangular image too.

The post Create a shadow in Canva round element first appeared on Phuket Web Design.

5 min tutorial on how to Create a shadow in Canva round element. Hello everyone and welcome back to a Gimp / Canva Tutorial

The post Create a shadow in Canva round element first appeared on Phuket Web Design.