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A common technique used to add some depth to an object is an inner shadow. You’ll see it used quite a bit, especially in Photoshop tutorials (Layer->Layer Style->Inner Shadow). It turns out that we can achieve more or less the same effect with Gimp. It just takes more work.

We’ll start with a red rectangle. You can make it any size you want and pick a background color.

Now, select the rectangle. This can easily be done using the fuzzy select tool (magic wand). Next, shrink the selection by about 10px (Select->Shrink).

And then feather the selection by 5px (Select->Feather).

We almost have the selection we need. All we need to do is invert it (Select->Invert). There it is. This selection we’ll fill with a dark gray.

But wait. We don’t want to wipe out the rectangle. Create a new layer (Layer->New Layer) and call it inner shadow. With this layer active, go ahead and fill in the selected region.

We’re almost there. Reduce the opacity some on the inner shadow layer to let the rectangle underneath come through some. You can see that our shadow extends far beyond where it should. It should be confined to the box. To fix this, select the base layer (the one with the box).

Again, select the box and then invert the selection. Finally, switch back to the inner shadow layer and cut away the selection (Edit->Cut).

We’re done.

As illustrated, you can achieve an effect similar to that of Photoshop’s inner shadow with Gimp. It just takes a few more clicks of the mouse.

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