Grounding a cutout: floor reflection and contact shadow

This article shows you how to sit a background-removed player cutout on the floor of your design using the two Floor Effects controls: Floor reflection and Contact shadow. Both appear live on the canvas and carry through to the final render.

Why a cutout needs grounding

When you remove the background from a full-length player photo, the subject is left as a cutout with transparent edges. Dropped onto a template, that cutout tends to float — there's nothing beneath the feet to say where the player is standing, so the figure reads as pasted on top of the design rather than standing in it.

The two floor effects fix that in different ways:

Floor reflection — a fading mirror image of the subject below the feet, as if the player were standing on a polished floor.
Contact shadow — a small dark pool directly under the feet, which is what makes the contact between player and floor actually read.

You can use either on its own or both together. The shadow is usually the one that does the heavy lifting; the reflection is the finishing touch.

Where to find Floor Effects

Select the photo layer on the canvas or in the layer list.
In the properties panel on the right, scroll to the Floor Effects section.
Check Floor reflection or Contact shadow to turn that effect on. Its sliders appear indented beneath the checkbox.

The Floor Effects section only appears on photo layers whose fit mode is Top Fill — the full-length player mode. If you don't see the section, check the layer's fit setting first. Both effects start switched off, so an existing design never changes until you turn one on.

Floor reflection

Check Floor reflection to mirror the subject below its feet and fade the mirror out as it moves away from the floor line. Three sliders control it.

Slider	What it does	Default
Opacity	How strong the reflection is at its brightest point, right at the feet. It fades to invisible from there down. Range 0–100%.	35%
Length	How far down the reflection reaches, as a share of the subject's own height. Range 5–60%.	25% (about a quarter of the subject's height)
Gap	Nudges the reflection down away from the feet (positive) or up behind them (negative). Range −10% to +10% of the subject's height.	0%

Leave Gap at 0% and the reflection starts exactly at the lowest point of the cutout. A small negative gap is worth trying when a cutout carries faint leftover pixels below the shoes — those pixels sit lower than the visible foot line, so pulling the reflection up tucks the seam back under the player.

Contact shadow

Check Contact shadow to lay a soft, elliptical pool of darkness under the feet. It's the single most convincing grounding cue: even a subtle one stops the cutout from looking like a sticker. Five controls appear.

Control	What it does	Default
Color	The shadow color. Click the swatch to open the color picker. Pick a colour sampled from your background rather than pure black when the design's floor is strongly tinted.	Black
Opacity	How dark the shadow is at its centre. It falls off to nothing at the edge. Range 0–100%.	45%
Width	How wide the pool spreads relative to the width of the subject's feet. 100% matches the feet exactly; higher values spread wider. Range 50–300%.	160%
Softness	How tall the ellipse is, which is what reads as soft or tight. Low values give a thin, crisp line under the shoes; high values give a broad, diffuse pool. Range 1–10% of the subject's height.	4%
Offset	Slides the shadow down below the feet, up to 10% of the subject's height. Useful when you want the light to read as coming from in front and slightly above.	0%

Unchecking either effect removes it from the canvas without discarding your slider settings — re-check the box and your values come back.

Why the effects stay proportionate across photos

Every geometric value in this section — Length, Gap, Softness, Offset — is measured against the subject Templified detects in the photo, not against the layer frame. Templified finds the top of the subject, the bottom of the subject, and the width of the feet, then sizes the reflection and shadow as fractions of that.

This matters when the same template slot receives photo after photo. Two players shot at different distances land in the frame at different sizes, and a shadow measured against the frame would look correct on one and comically large or small on the other. Because the measurement follows the subject instead, one set of slider values holds up across a whole team's worth of photos, whatever the framing — and it holds at any output size, so a design tuned on screen prints correctly at poster size.

The Width slider follows the same rule, measured against the width of the subject's feet rather than the whole photo — so a player standing with feet together and one standing wide apart each get a shadow that fits.

The preview matches the render

The editor and the render engine build the floor effects with exactly the same logic, so what you see on the canvas is what comes out of the final render. There's no separate apply step and no surprise when the finished file arrives.

If a layer's photo is replaced later — a new player photo dropped into the same slot — the effects are rebuilt against the new subject automatically. You don't need to retune the sliders.