drop shadow taking on color of masked image

[Jess Molchan]

Hi! I'm trying to make a mood board with squares that have drop shadows. In the squares, I put my images. When I tried it out today, the drop shadow took on the image instead of remaining black like I intended. (Please see screenshots.) How do I stop this and keep the drop shadow black?

[v_kyr]

One way is to make a rectangle and apply an FX outter shadow to that one, afterwards to clip your pixel layer image underneath that rectangle then.

See also ...

• Masking vs clipping layers (tutorial video)

[thomaso]

Hi @Jess Molchan,
Welcome to the Affinity Forums!

The nested rectangle layer is used to crop the image above. Modifications done to it do modify its cropping area. So also a stroke applied to the rectangle alters the cropping size. To apply a shadow to the squared image you would apply it to the image layer, not to the nested rectangle.

[Jess Molchan]

@v_kyr thank you! That's what I was doing wrong, I wanted to clip but instead I masked! That video was extremely helpful and I was able to get it looking the way I wanted. Thanks again