Curved Drop Shadow in Affinity Publisher

[polyostinato]

Is it possible to apply a curved drop shadow around an image? This is something I can do easily in Pages on my Mac, but I would love to use this same shadow in Affinity Publisher.  Thanks in advance!

[GarryP]

Welcome to the forums @polyostinato

I don’t think this is possible with a single effect but you can simulate it pretty well by adding an extra couple of layers.
See attached image and document – document was created with Designer but the same functionality is available in Publisher.
It’s not perfect, but I’m guessing that most people won’t notice the difference.
Some tinkering with settings may be necessary to get a better result.
Also, there may be other methods, so keep checking back to see if anyone else has a better method.

curved-paper-shadow.afdesign

[polyostinato]

Hi Garry, Thanks! That looks very good to me. How did you create it?

Brad

[GarryP]

You’re welcome.
Have a look at the example document which I attached in my earlier post.
Look at the types of layers, how they have been organised, and the Effects settings that have been used.
Further experimentation with shape, size, position and settings may yield a better result.

[firstdefence]

A slightly different method to Garys is to have a rectangle, convert it to curves and bend the bottom of that curve upwards, then apply gaussian blur to suit.

curved-paper-shadow.afdesign

[GarryP]

That’s a good alternative but it has the same sort of problem as my own, which is that the shadow in the centre of the curve is blurred whereas it’s not (much) in the original example.
I think this needs a bit more experimentation to get something really nice.

[firstdefence]

12 minutes ago, GarryP said:

That’s a good alternative but it has the same sort of problem as my own, which is that the shadow in the centre of the curve is blurred whereas it’s not (much) in the original example.
I think this needs a bit more experimentation to get something really nice.

Good point, needs a gradient blur, one to request eh!

[GarryP]

I’ve never used a “gradient blur” but if such a thing would help with work other than just this particular case then a feature request would seem in order.
In lieu of such functionality, maybe a transparency gradient fill could be added to the blur in some way. I don’t have time to check just now but it’s worth a try.

[firstdefence]

Been having a play, you could duplicate the layer and have a sharp version that gets a radial transparency but you have to be careful not to show the sharp edge towards the edges, you also have a radial shading so not only does the shadow get sharper as it nears the centre it also gets blacker. 

Got to go out now but nice puzzle to solve.

As a quick side thought, I wonder if brushes would work as a stamp for these effects, or even screen grabs to tag onto the bottom of a rectangle.

[RNKLN]

With Depth of Field you can get nice effects.

[Wosven]

2 hours ago, GarryP said:

That’s a good alternative but it has the same sort of problem as my own, which is that the shadow in the centre of the curve is blurred whereas it’s not (much) in the original example.
I think this needs a bit more experimentation to get something really nice.

When I had to do this, I end up doing it with a high resolution image, and since I needed to resize it a lot depending of the above frames, it was efficient and keeping the smaller and darker part. It was only the shadow at the bottom, not on the sides, so it could be use in a more dramatic way increasing opacity and height, for example, or only half side for specific frames.

[GarryP]

@RNKLN That looks lovely but the OP asked what they could do in Publisher, and I don’t think Publisher has a Depth of Field function.

@Wosven Can you supply an example using your method?

I had another try and came up with my attached image and document.
The “Hard Shadow” and "Blurred Shadow" layers each have a horizontal transparency gradient applied (reverse of each other).
It’s still not quite right though, and it's a fair bit of bother - more experimentation needed.

curved-paper-shadow2.afdesign

[PixelPest]

As it seems OP is asking for AffinityPublisher it might be just layer-fx Gaussian blur:

CurvedShadow.afpub

[GarryP]

I think that is similar to firstdefence’s suggestion above but it also still has a lot of blur near the centre, which isn’t as pronounced in the original example.

[PixelPest]

... it´s simply not available like the one in Pages.app or Gravit for example:

 

If you want it more DOF-like you can add a third object (filled with the background color), less blurred to mask the dark shadow towards the middle. More fake:

[Wosven]

2 hours ago, GarryP said:

Can you supply an example using your method?

Here a file from the preliminary search on a project (it takes longer since at some point APub beta refused to save the file and I had to redo modifications 🥵 )

_example_file.afpub

[RNKLN]

Next try (looking for a workaround; I support the OP's request to have something for this in Affinity's products).

The object and the shadow will become one if you do that, but you can copy-paste from Pages into Publisher. Also, for some reason, Affinity puts handles around the object some distance away from the actual edges.

 

[PixelPest]

It´s propably the size of the filtered part for the clipboard of the image copy/paste procedure - as it lands as a raster graphic.