Just an idea in case anyone is watching. I use dropshadows in layer styles all the time. I mock up artwork on walls a lot and use dropshadows on the frames. I get quite close to real looking shadows by using upwards of five dropshadows per frame/object, but with a few improvements the dropshadow effect could be much better.
A 'length parameter' could be added. This would act differently to distance, in that rather than simply positioning the layer shape further away, it would give an angled stretch in the appropriate direction, (as if you duplicated and moved the object incrementally many many times like an illustrator blend). It is effectively the same as if you were to add an angle option to the spread parameter. When objects touch walls/floors the shadow starts at the point of contact and stretches away and this is not possible to do with the current dropshadow.
The second thing I'd like to see is a very simple deform function, much like the warp mesh in layer transform, so that the shadow does not have to be exactly the same as its layer. Because when paper is lying on the ground for example, the shadow is often uneven due to small varitations in height. Current dropshadow functionality looks overly clinical and unreal.
Aa a workaround I often make a fill layer of the same pixels and position it under the layer I want to apply shadows to, i set it to 0 fill and put dropshadows on this layer. This way I can motion blur it and distort it without affecting the image layer. But its a faff and I end up with a lot of layers.
Thanks for listening!
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