How can I add shadows to my product photos using AI?

The problem with adding shadows to product photos is that most people think of shadows as decoration. They're not. Shadows are physics.

Light comes from somewhere. The shadow follows. The surface has a material. The shadow reflects that. Get the physics wrong and your photo looks fake. Not "a bit off"—obviously fake.

So when you try to add shadows in Photoshop by painting dark areas or using filters, it doesn't work. Those tools don't know where the light is coming from. They don't know what the surface is made of. They don't understand the shape of your product. You end up with something that looks like a graphic design element pasted onto a photo, not a real photograph.

The solution is to use a tool that understands how shadows actually work. Nightjar models the lighting direction, the surface material, and your product's form. You tell it what you want in plain English—"soft shadows from the left" or "hard shadows on a reflective surface"—and it calculates where the shadows should actually fall.

Here's what's different: Nightjar keeps your product exactly as it is. Same colors, same materials, same details. Only the shadows change. And because it's trained on real product photography, the shadows look natural. Not like they were added later.

If you're starting from scratch, you can generate the whole scene with shadows built in from the beginning. This usually works better because the lighting, shadows, and product are created together as one thing, not layered on top of each other.

But here's the real trick: you can create a photography style in Nightjar by uploading a few images you like. The tool learns the shadow style from those images—the lighting direction, the softness, how they fall on different surfaces. Then you can reuse that style for all your product photos. Every new image will have the same shadow characteristics, as if they were all shot with the same camera, the same lens, the same lighting setup. Your product photos will look consistent, not just realistic.