Transparent shadow... is it possible?

[noiseordinance]

Hey there. I have an image that has letters with stroke and shadow. I'm planning on printing it on t-shirts for a school fundraiser. Right now I have a white font with black stroke and black shadow so that it stands out when placed over a graphic. It looks great on a black shirt. However, if I want to print it on a different colored shirt, say pink, it'd be nice to not have a black shadow / stroke, but instead take on the color of the shirt. If the stroke and shadow was transparent, I could get away with a one color image... does this make sense at all? Here's a couple samples... as you can see, the image of the graphic on black background is really just black and white... whereas the one with pink is black and white and pink... any suggestions?

 

[IamSam]

Hey, There may be other ways to accomplish this, but here's one way. In the layer style, you could change both the stroke and the drop shadows blend mode to "overlay" as well as lowering the opacity to about 50%. (I did not show the lowered opacity setting, just where it was located)



This is the white letters with the above settings on a pinkish background



Hope this helps.

 

[noiseordinance]

Hey, thank you so much for the pointers! I have one last question... please forgive if I should be starting a new thread for this. On the original clips of the image I posted above, you can see a shape in the background of the letters. It's actually the shape of a state. The problem is it's really pixelated. What I did was I used the magic wand to cut it from the original image and paste it into a layer, resulting in the pixelation. I'd really like to smooth this out. Every tutorial I've seen involves the use of a Gaussian blur but when I do that, it makes the edges of the shape really round. Since it's the outline of the state of Texas, I'd really like to keep the sharp edges. Can anyone provide some advice? I'd hate to print 100 shirts with a pixelated state as the background. :sad:

 

[ibclare]

No, you needn't start a new thread for this.

First thing I would suggest is to get a larger or higher resolution image of the state. I would have suggested a gaussian blur also. Have you tried differing amounts of the blur or tried a surface blur maybe?

Well, the other thing you could do and probably should be first in fact, assuming you want the state image to be a solid color block, is to hold down ctl/cmd key and click on the thumbnail on the layer. Make a new layer with the selection active and fill it with a solid color. That seems like the easiest solution to me.

 

[Crotale]

If I may suggest, there is another immediate consideration to be made when printing on tee shirts: DPI. This is the number of dots per inch in print. Your attached images are 72 DPI, which are generally lower than most raster prints on tees. Most print shops request a minimum print quality of 200 DPI and the optimum quality is at least 300dpi.