CSS Drop Shadow vs Box Shadow

The other day Josh made a super cool tweet about drop-shadow supporting PNG's; I didn't know it supported PNG's, so I decided to give it a go.

🔥 box-shadow doesn't work well with transparent images. filter: drop-shadow does what you'd expect, adding a shadow to the image's contents.

.my-img {
filter: drop-shadow(1px 2px 3px black);
}

CSS filters are so rad 🥰

Pen: https://t.co/rVKgSlijt1 pic.twitter.com/6rwc7gG1Ro

— Josh ✨ (@joshwcomeau) July 30, 2020

HTML Structure

For my example we are using my favourite Pokémon "Eevee" and will place our three Eevee png's in a container.

<div class="container">
  <img src="https://i.imgur.com/q3SXJQf.png" />
  <img src="https://i.imgur.com/q3SXJQf.png" class="box-shadow" />
  <img src="https://i.imgur.com/q3SXJQf.png" class="drop-shadow" />
</div>

As you can see one is going to be a raw example, one will have a box-shadow and the third will have the drop-shadow.

CSS Box Shadow

You probably have seen and used the box-shadow before, it's a cool feature and adds a shadow to our "box".

It works like this:

.box-shadow {
  box-shadow: 0px 0px 10px #000;
}

It puts a shadow on the image, but on the box of it.

CSS Drop Shadow

Then there is a CSS Filter which is amazing when it comes to contouring a PNG!

.drop-shadow {
  filter: drop-shadow(0px 0px 10px rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.5));
}

This all will result in the following Codepen.

Browser Support

As mentioned before, CSS Filters are cool, but not widely supported yet 😩.

There is a polyfill, but also limited.

Thank you for reading, and let's connect!

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Comments

[Christoph Weßels]

thanks for the tip

[Chris Bongers]

Hi Christoph! Your welcome, hope it serves you some use in the feature.

[William Henderson]

Drop Shadow is VERY buggy on iOS so I strongly recommend not using it if your app will be used on iOS.