Subtle shadow adds a touch of elegance to any image or text. If you desire to have one on your own, try the following steps:

To start off, you will need something to put in a dropshadow to in your photoshop. This can be text, a logo, clipart or anything at your choice. It will need to be on its own separate layer, whatever it is. Press "D" on your keyboard to reset the colors to their default values.

If you're putting your dropshadow on text, select the Type Tool and type your text. Make a new layer and drag it underneath the layer that contains your text/object. This is layer is the shadow. Hold down CTRL on your keyboard and click on the text/object layer, and it should load a selection around it. Choose Filters, Blur, Gaussian Blur and enter a value that gives you the blur you want. Change to the default (black foreground/white background) colors by clicking on the small black and white squares below and to the left of the foreground/background color swatches. Use ALT-Backspace to fill the text with black. Make sure that Preserve Transparency is off in the layer palette.

Now, go to Select-> Feather and choose a number and press OK. The higher the number, the more "soft" and spread out your dropshadow will be.

Now, depending on the direction your "light source" is coming from (top left, bottom right, etc) you need to move the Shadow layer several pixels up/down and several pixels right/left. You can sometimes make the illusion that the object is high above the background by using much higher numbers... and bear in mind that the numbers do not have to be identical (i.e. could be 4 and 7, etc).

If you have most likely noticed that the shadow looks a bit unrealistically dark, adjust the opacity of the Shadow layer.

There! You have created shadow in your graphics. It adds up elegance and modishness to any text, logo or clipart.