🌓Drop Shadow & Reflection Adder

A cut-out product on flat white can look like a sticker: no weight, no contact with the ground, no sense of scale. Studios fix that with a lit sweep and a glossy surface. The Drop Shadow & Reflection Adder does it after the fact, turning a transparent cut-out into a grounded product photo shadow or a glass-shelf product reflection, in bulk, with the same settings on every image so a category page looks like one shoot. It is a shadow generator built for products rather than text.

How it works

1. Drop cut-out PNGs with transparent backgrounds (make them first with the Background Remover if needed).
2. Choose Shadow, Reflection or Both.
3. For the shadow, set angle (where the light comes from), distance (how far it falls), blur (how soft) and opacity (how dark). A colour other than black is available for tinted scenes.
4. For the reflection, set how tall the mirrored copy is as a percentage of the product and how quickly it fades.
5. Choose padding and the background colour (white for marketplaces, transparent to keep composing), then process and download the ZIP.

The shadow is built from the alpha channel of the cut-out, so it follows the product outline rather than a rectangle: a bottle throws a bottle-shaped shadow. Reflection mirrors the bottom of the product and applies a gradient mask so it dissolves into the background. Padding is added automatically so nothing is clipped when you add drop shadow to image files with a large offset.

Why it matters

Shadow and reflection are cheap realism, and realism sells: shoppers cannot handle the product, so cues of weight and surface do part of that job. There are rules to respect, though.

• Amazon requires a pure white background (RGB 255, 255, 255) on the main image with no props. A soft, low-opacity shadow that fades fully to white is normally treated as part of the product; heavy reflections belong on secondary images.
• eBay prefers a plain white or neutral first photo and forbids added artwork; keep effects subtle there.
• Shopify and your own site have no such limits, and a consistent reflection across a 2048×2048 grid is a strong brand signal.

Tips

• Keep angle and distance identical across a batch; mismatched light directions on one page are more noticeable than no shadow at all.
• Start at 25 to 35% opacity and 20 to 30 px blur for a natural contact shadow; increase distance for objects that appear to float, such as earrings.
• Use reflection for glossy goods (cosmetics, electronics, glassware) and shadow for matte goods (textiles, furniture).
• Output transparent if the next step is the Add Border / Frame tool or a collage; output white if the next step is the Amazon Product Image Resizer.
• Fix exposure and white balance first with the Photo Enhancer; a shadow under a dull product just makes a dull product with a shadow.
• Start from a clean cut-out from the Background Remover; a leftover fringe will be duplicated in the reflection.

Privacy

Compositing is done with the Canvas API in a Web Worker on your device. Your images never leave your browser, so unreleased product shots stay unreleased.