Anyone know how to apply edge shadows on amber bottles and their labels, or cosmetic jars etc?

[Guest]

Hi, does anyone know how to create edge shadow lines on labels of product using photoshop?

I google and all I can come up with is drop shadows, shadows on bottom of product, that can of thing. But nothing on darkening side edges.

I've attached an insert so you can clearly see what I'm talking about. 

Thankyou so much.

VG

[Conrad_C]

Can the Inner Shadow layer style help? (Layer > Layer Style > Inner Shadow)

You can clip or mask it to the label or bottle to limit where it appears.

[didiermazier]

I would select the area of the label (or bottle) to mask a gradient layer with eventually a blending mode.

Example without blending mode (just black 100 to 0% symétrically) :

 Then at any time you can edit the gradient to change the shadows as wanted.

Before

 

[Trevor.Dennis]

I like to keep everything on its own layer.

So the brown bottle is completely blank.

The label consists of three layers: White rectangle, Adobe logo, Photoshop (grabbed from Help > About Photoshop). These are combined in a Smart Object to make the next stage more convenient.

Ctrl clicking the brown bottle layer to make a selection of its outline, and then Edit > Stroke on a new layer using Centre.  I used 20 pixels.

You can see that the stroke overflows beyond the bottle at this stage.

Ctrl D to deselect

...and Clip the stroked outline layer to the label layer.

The overflow area of the stroke now disappears.

I've made the stroked outline layer a Smart Object so when we blur it (Gaussian Blur — I used 20 pixels), we can edit the value for best effect.

Stroked outlines are super useful in all sorts of situations.  I used a white stroke to simulate a specular highlight on the outliner of the jet below to delineate it from the dark background although, looking at it now, I wished I'd blured the stroke more.

Same thing with this sky bridge illustration (from one of our Something For The Weekend threads).  In this case a white to black gradient was run down a layer mask to fade the stroke by distance to simulate perspective.  It's a useful tool to have in your big box of Photoshop tricks and tips.