Shaded borders on textures

Hello, and thanks for reading. I have seen numerous builds in sl that make use of shaded textures especially around the borders of a prim. As much as I have looked in SL to purchase these textures, I haven't been able to find any. So, I come here in hopes of gathering an idea of how one would go about creating them. I have photoshop, although I am a novice, so any links or tips you can give would be very much appreciated! Thanks!

I make a top layer and use a circle gradient with reverse box checked at the top and set the opacity to my choosing. This is just one simple way of adding some uniform darker edges. You can also just use the paint brush and color in around the edges of a top layer too.
I suggest goggling this with PS Tutorials so may out there with very good instructions, compared to mine

I'm not a fan of just using layer opacity to create shadows. What a lot of people don't tend to realize is that shadows are not actually black. They're always a deeper tone of the base color they fall on. A shadow on a red surface is deep red, not black, and a shadow on a blue surfaces is deep blue, etc.

Painters are taught this very early on. To apply a shading when painting, you add the color's opposite to the paint. You don't add black.

In the digital realm, when you put a translucent black layer over a color, you blacken the color, rather than deepening it, which is not optically correct. For a shadow to look how it's supposed to, the base color must be deepened, not blackened.

For this reason, I most often use overlays for applying lighting and shading, rather than normal layers. On an overlay layer, shades of gray approaching white will brighten the underlying image, shades of gray approaching black will darken the image, and 50% gray will have no effect at all. This makes for very powerful and precise control over shading.

First I'll create a new layer, and set its blending mode to overlay, soft light, hard light, vivid light, linear light, or pin light, or sometimes multiply, depending on the effect I want. Then I flood the canvas with 50% gray, for a starting point. If I need a graded shadow, I'll either paint it with the gradient tool, or I'll apply a gradient overlay in the blending options, depending on whether I want it to be parametric or not. If I need more precisely shaped shading, rather than just a uniform gradient, I'll paint the shape I want, either with the paintbrush, or with the Dodge & Burn tools, and then if necessary, I'll apply a gaussian blur to it, to soften it up a bit, as hard edged shadows almost never exist in RL.

The results of this technique can be far more realistic than those of just putting translucent black on a normal layer.



Also, Photoshop's lighting engine (Filter -> Render -> Lighting Effects) can work really well, if you know how to use it. Notice at the bottom of the dialog is a dropdown selector called Texture Channel. This allows you to use a channel as a bump map. Whit is high, black is low, 50% gray has no effect, and all other shades of gray fall in between. High areas will cast shadows onto low areas, in accordance with whatever direction(s) you aim the light(s).

You can also parametrically control the coloring, intensity, focus, and shape(s) of the light(s), as well as the material properties, exposure level, and ambient light level, of underlying image.

CS4 actually brings all this functionality to a whole new level, with the advent of smart filters. All of these effects can now be applied non-destructively. You can go back and change the settings at any time. It's great.


This, by the way, is one of the many, many reasons I constantly harp on why it's so important to learn alpha channel methodology. The "white = maximum, black = minimum, grays are in between" logic applies to just about every aspect of imagery there is. Casual SL users tend to think it's just some convoluted way of creating transparency, but that's just the smallest molecule on the thinnest edge of the smallest tip of the largest iceberg you could imagine. In the world of imagery, who commands alpha maps controls the universe. Those who refuse to learn to use alphas handicap themselves in more ways than they could ever count.

true I dont try to use black often ...I do need to master the way you say to get to the next level. However its been useful for me to keep it simpler. I think myself taking a course in a local college on ps may be a good way to go as I only have been going off tutorials or is there an online program that you recommend?

Hi , there are vast resources right here in the texture forums and a huge amount of tutorials on the internet . Google is such a good freind for helping to learn photoshop. It`s heart warming to see the professional graphics artist so willing to share there knowledge with us amatures Here`s a link from the forums I keep bookmarked for referance.
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