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Easy Drop Shadow for OS X

How to add a clean drop shadow to a screenshot on a Mac without Photoshop or any other image editor, using a shortcut that is already built into macOS.

By Mark Koemans 2 min read

Close-up of a white and grey wall of folded geometric panels casting soft drop shadows

This article is also available in German.Read the German version

What is this about?

Have you ever wondered how to quickly add a drop shadow to a screenshot on your Mac machine? This simple task can be difficult to achieve if you don’t own an image editor like Photoshop. But if you know how, it just looks so neat!

So, you want to send a nice email and highlight a screenshot you took? Something like this maybe?

A mail window showing the AppleScript that pipes a file through the ImageMagick convert command to add a drop shadow

Actually this is easy to achieve. You will need to go through a few setup steps. Once everything is done you’ll be able to add a drop shadow with a simple right click action on every image you want.

Setup

To add a drop shadow we use an OS X Automator workflow and a program called ImageMagick. First we check whether ImageMagick is installed, install it if it is not, then install the Automator workflow.

  1. Open a terminal. Hit cmd and space, search for "terminal" and start it.
  2. Check whether ImageMagick is there. Type which convert.
  3. Read the result. If you get an output like /opt/local/bin/convert, ImageMagick is installed and you can skip straight to the download.
  4. Pick a package manager. MacPorts and Homebrew do essentially the same thing, take either. To keep this lean we use MacPorts.
  5. Install ImageMagick. Follow the MacPorts installation guide and the OS X Package Install procedure, then type sudo port install ImageMagick.
  6. Download the workflow. Get the Drop Shadow Automator workflow from this download.
  7. Install it. Unzip and double click the Drop-Shadow.workflow file. OS X asks whether you want to install it, click Install.

The OS X Service Installer dialog asking whether to install the Drop shadow service, with Open with Automator, Cancel and Install buttons

Now browse to an image, right click on it, choose -> services -> Drop Shadow.

After you click on it a copy of the image with a drop shadow will be created in the same folder (eg. Desktop).

Enjoy!