Creating shadows (was Re: New Maps API blog post)

On Wed, Nov 23, 2005 at 07:55:38PM +0000, Mike Williams wrote:
>
> Wasn't it Paul who wrote:
> >
> >On that subject, does anyone have a tutorial for making a 45 degree shadow,
> >preferably using the Gimp? At the moment I just stick the wrong shadow on there!
>
> I don't know the Gimp, but in PSP I do this:
>
> take a copy of the marker
> change all the opaque points to black
> reduce the opacity to about 50%
> skew the image by 45 degrees
> add some blur

Aagh. What a pain. This is the best I came up with so far:

Using ImageMagick's convert:

convert -trim in.png out1.png
convert -white-threshold 0 out1.png out2.jpg
convert -shear 45x0 -background black out2.jpg out3.png
convert -transparent black out3.png out4.png
convert -shadow 70 out4.png out5.png
convert -trim out5.png out6.png

Result: http://www.sbrk.co.uk/test/

Any ImageMagick experts about that can do that properly??

Paul