How can I draw a curved shadow?

Question

Like so:

I know that this will not work with NSShadow, drawing it in drawRect: will work just fine.

Answer 1

You can do this and many other kinds of shadows using Core Animations layers and the shadowPath property. The shadow that you are describing can be make with an elliptical shadow path.

The code to produce this shadow is below. You can tweak the size of the ellipse to have a rounder shape of the shadow. You can also tweak the position, opacity, color and blur radius using the shadow properties on the layer.

self.wantsLayer = YES;

NSView *viewWithRoundShadow = [[NSView alloc] initWithFrame:NSMakeRect(30, 30, 200, 100)];
[self addSubview:viewWithRoundShadow];

CALayer *backingLayer = viewWithRoundShadow.layer;
backingLayer.backgroundColor = [NSColor orangeColor].CGColor;

// Configure shadow
backingLayer.shadowColor   = [NSColor blackColor].CGColor;
backingLayer.shadowOffset  = CGSizeMake(0, -1.);
backingLayer.shadowRadius  = 5.0;
backingLayer.shadowOpacity = 0.75;

CGRect shadowRect = backingLayer.bounds;
CGFloat shadowRectHeight = 25.;
shadowRect.size.height = shadowRectHeight;
// make narrow
shadowRect = CGRectInset(shadowRect, 5, 0);

backingLayer.shadowPath = CGPathCreateWithEllipseInRect(shadowRect, NULL);

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Just to show some examples of other shadows than can be created using the same technique; a path like this

will produce a shadow like this