An image that is about to be imported into Adobe Premiere Pro can carry a pre-rendered drop shadow when the Lizely Add Shadow to Image browser tool writes the shadow into a transparent PNG with whole-pixel offsets, blur, opacity, and color chosen up front. This workflow is the fastest way to give a still plate a designer-style drop shadow without opening Photoshop, Illustrator, or any video editor. The shadow becomes part of the raster, so it cannot be re-keyed, scaled away, or accidentally trimmed when the clip is re-timed, and it looks identical wherever the asset is reused: the master timeline, a nested sequence, a Mogrt template, or an exported file. Because the tool decodes the file, renders the shadow, encodes the PNG, previews it, and creates the download entirely inside the current browser tab, the source JPG, PNG, or WebP never reaches a remote server.
Why Prepare the Shadow Outside Premiere Pro?
Premiere Pro ships with a Drop Shadow effect under Video Effects → Perspective, and it produces an acceptable result for moving clips. The controls are designed for video, however: the effect lives on a clip layer, scales with the Motion → Scale setting, follows clip keyframes, and cannot be exported as a standalone still. For product photos, lower-third plates, sticker overlays, thumbnail graphics, or any image that needs to look identical across multiple timelines or render presets, baking the shadow into the PNG before import avoids drift. The trade-off — losing editable shadow parameters — is acceptable for stills, where you rarely need to retime the shadow separately from the foreground.
The browser workflow also handles transparent PNGs cleanly. Transparent areas stay transparent, and the tool only adds pixels where the source alpha actually casts a shadow. A product cut-out with a transparent background therefore gains a shadow without filling the surrounding canvas with color, and the result drops straight onto a video track over a background plate.
Shadow Controls and Output Limits
Before you start, it helps to know the exact ranges the tool accepts, because Premiere Pro will display the PNG at any size you choose and there is no warning if a value is out of range. The full set of inputs and limits is shown in the table below.
| Control | Accepted range | Behavior |
|---|---|---|
| Source file | JPG, PNG, or WebP up to 25 MiB | Must be browser-decodable; decoded locally |
| Horizontal offset | -500 to 500 whole pixels | Positive moves shadow right, negative moves it left |
| Vertical offset | -500 to 500 whole pixels | Positive moves shadow down, negative moves it up |
| Blur radius | 0 to 250 whole pixels | Browser Canvas shadow rendering, not prepress |
| Opacity | 0 to 100 whole percent | Applied to the shadow only |
| Color | Six-digit hex (for example #000000) | Exact hex, no separate alpha input |
| Output | PNG with transparency | Canvas expanded to fit shadow and blur falloff |
The tool accepts only whole-pixel offset values from -500 to 500. JPG and WebP sources are decoded to browser pixels, which strips their original compression bytes and metadata; the output is always a freshly encoded PNG.
How to Add the Shadow
- Open the Lizely Add Shadow to Image page and click the file input to choose a local JPG, PNG, or WebP within the 25 MiB limit. The file never leaves your browser.
- Type the horizontal offset, vertical offset, blur radius, opacity, and hex color you want. Positive horizontal values push the shadow right and negative values pull it left. Positive vertical values push the shadow down in the downloaded image, while negative values push it up.
- Select Add shadow. The tool decodes the image, expands the canvas to fit the shadow plus the blur falloff, draws the source once with the Canvas shadow state, then draws the source again on top without a shadow so the visible foreground stays sharp instead of being softened by translucent shadow color.
- Read the reported output dimensions and encoded file size. A 40 by 20 source with a +8 horizontal offset, a -4 vertical offset, and 6 pixels of blur becomes 72 by 48 pixels, because the canvas reserves twice the blur on every side (12 pixels each) and the absolute offset on the affected side (8 on the right, 4 on top): width = 40 + 12 + 20 = 72, height = 20 + 16 + 12 = 48.
- Select the download link to save the PNG. The file is named after the source — portrait.png becomes portrait-shadow.png — so it is easy to track inside a Premiere Pro project.
Changing the source or any control after the download invalidates the previous result and revokes its temporary download URL, so re-run the tool if you want a second variant.
Bring the Shadowed PNG into Premiere Pro
Once the PNG is on disk, the Premiere Pro side is short and stays predictable across re-edits.
- In the Project panel, right-click the bin where you want to store the asset and choose Import, or drag the PNG from your file explorer into the panel.
- Drag the imported image onto a video track above your background plate. Two stacked tracks are the simplest setup: V2 holds the shadowed still, V1 holds the underlying clip.
- Open Effect Controls and confirm the Motion settings: Position, Scale, and Anchor Point. The expanded canvas from the tool already leaves room around the foreground, so avoid scaling the image up and clipping the shadow back at the program monitor.
- If you want the shadow to feel softer on a dark background, add a small Gaussian Blur to the shadow plate through a track matte: duplicate the shadowed clip on V3, blur the lower copy, and use the upper copy as a Track Matte Key to cut the blur back to the image shape. The baked-in shadow on the V2 layer remains untouched.
- Export with your normal preset. Because the shadow is part of the raster, the look survives round-trips through Dynamic Link, nested sequences, and color-managed exports.
This workflow keeps Premiere Pro's built-in Drop Shadow effect free for moving video clips while reserving stills for a higher-fidelity, repeatable result. If you also want rounded corners on the same still, follow the how to round image corners in Premiere Pro guide after the shadow is baked in.
Common Use Cases for Shadowed Stills in Video
A baked shadow is most useful when the still must look identical across multiple timelines. Product thumbnails for an e-commerce YouTube series benefit from a consistent shadow that does not flicker when the source clip changes underneath. Lower-third name plates and callout graphics usually need a clean drop shadow so they stay legible over both light and dark footage, and baking it keeps the shadow from drifting as the plate switches. Mogrt templates imported into Premiere Pro treat each asset as a raster, so a pre-shadowed PNG is the simplest way to ship a designer-style look without handing over a complex effect stack. Stickers and badges layered over talking-head footage work the same way: a transparent PNG with a controlled shadow drops onto V2 and stays anchored to the subject for the entire shot.
Local Processing and Privacy
The tool decodes the image, expands the canvas, draws the shadow state, encodes the PNG, builds the preview, and creates the download inside the current browser tab. Nothing is uploaded to a remote image service, which matters for client work, unreleased products, and any still that contains personally identifiable information. The file stays on your machine from selection to download. Source and expanded output dimensions are checked against the site's bounded canvas budget before allocation, and invalid types, empty files, oversized decoded images, impossible output dimensions, decode errors, missing Canvas support, and PNG encoding failures produce a visible error rather than a silent failure.
Why the Shadow Can Look Slightly Different From Other Apps
Canvas shadowBlur is a browser rendering effect rather than a print prepress measurement, so the exact feather pixels can vary slightly between browser engines. The tool does not claim byte-for-byte equivalence with Photoshop's Drop Shadow, Illustrator's Effect → Stylize → Drop Shadow, CSS box-shadow, or the Premiere Pro Drop Shadow video effect. For mockups, thumbnails, stickers, and video overlays, the visual match is normally close enough. For surgical print prepress, finish the shadow in a print-aware tool. The tool also does not add a border, remove a background, detect the subject, create a perspective floor shadow, or simulate studio lighting; it produces a straightforward raster drop shadow with predictable canvas bounds.