Adding Drop-Shadow - Where to Crop?

[Fretman]

It's frustrating when I find out I didn't leave enough room for a drop-shadow effect to end smoothly, rather than being cut off where I cropped the image. Is there an easy way to know exactly where the drop shadow ends, exactly where it's safe to crop the image?

see the bottom edge of the attached example image

[ofnuts]

If you are talking about Layer/Effects/Drop shadow, there is no "simple" way to compute mentally how much the shadow will spread, or you are much better at math (especially trig) than I am, because there are too many parameters involved. On the other hand, it shouldn't matter... you decide how big the shadow is (or how far it gets) by playing with the controls.

If you want to check how far the shadow goes, you can use the Pointer dialog to display useful information (RGBA, HSV...) on the pixel where the pointer is, on the active layer or on the whole image.

You can also crop using Layer/Autocrop, it will only copy the completely transparent pixels in the layer. For the final image, autorcrop all layers, then autocrop the image.